Mark Sisson > Quotes

“A man’s health can be judged by which he takes two at a time—pills or stairs. —Joan Welsh”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“The profound psychological benefits of play are integral to healthy cultures, communities, and individuals, including a direct relationship to work productivity. Engage in some unstructured outdoor physical exertion each day to counter the negative effects of a sedentary, technological existence.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Coconut’s distinctive medium-chain composition has been shown to offer protection from heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and many other degenerative illnesses, to improve immune function and fat metabolism, and to protect against liver damage from alcohol and other toxins, and deliver anti-inflammatory and immune-supporting properties.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“eating a low-fat diet rich in whole grains such as bread, rice, pasta, and cereal can easily make you fat and malnourished.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Calm, quiet, dark evenings, and consistent bed and wake times are critical factors for high quality sleep.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“The fact remains that no culture or society has ever survived for an extended period of time on a meatless diet. While it would seem to be much easier to live and evolve without having to run around and kill animals, the truth is that we need the concentrated, nutrient-rich energy source of meat to support accelerated brain development—our distinguishing feature that brought us to the top of the food chain.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“When blood insulin levels are high, those same fat cells store not only the excess glucose but the fat you ate at your last meal. Moreover, high insulin signals the fat cells to hold on to the fat and not release it for energy. If the pattern of high insulin-generating meals continues, fat cells swell up and you gain weight.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“That means to push very heavy weight, repeatedly, and to constantly strive to elevate both your baseline numbers and the total weight lifted at the workout—until you start to reach a natural limit relative to your competitive goals. This will deliver improvements in strength and subsequent improvements in endurance performance, and also maximize the hormonal, anti-aging benefits of the workout.”
― Mark Sisson, Primal Endurance: Escape chronic cardio and carbohydrate dependency and become a fat burning beast!

“When the topic of food comes up in conversation with family, friends or casual acquaintances, it’s fascinating to hear the litany of rationalizations, knee-jerk defense mechanisms, self-limiting belief statements and general confusion or ignorance from otherwise intelligent folks when it comes to eating healthfully. But then again, Conventional Wisdom has often led even the best and brightest minds in nutritional science astray.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Scientists generally agree that the more HDL you have, the lower your risk for heart disease. As you might have imagined, people with Metabolic Syndrome and type 2 diabetes also typically have low levels of beneficial HDL. Exercise is one of the cheapest, easiest, and most effective ways to raise HDL. Consuming saturated fat is another!”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“When you use defense mechanisms like “Everything in moderation,” “You only live once,” and the like, you disguise the fact that over years and decades, those little ice cream outings can add up literally to hundreds of pounds of ingested substances that are toxic to your body.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Lift something heavy most every day, even if it’s just your weary body up to the pullup bar a few times.”
― Mark Sisson, Primal Endurance: Escape chronic cardio and carbohydrate dependency and become a fat burning beast!

“a significant amount of Conventional Wisdom about healthy eating is marketing fodder that grossly distorts the fundamental truth that humans thrive on natural plant and animal foods or that relies on gimmicks to support the dogma of flawed, manipulated “research.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Macadamia nuts earn a distinction above other nuts and seeds because of their superior nutritional value.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Pursue new challenges, such as music, language, hobbies, or adventures that stimulate your brain and allow you to depart from your daily routine. This will keep you refreshed and energized for your core daily responsibilities and economic contribution.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Believe it or not, going out and doing four to six hundred-meter sprints is a perfectly respectable workout for an endurance athlete. That’s only a couple minutes total of hard work,”
― Mark Sisson, Primal Endurance: Escape chronic cardio and carbohydrate dependency and become a fat burning beast!

“The ingestion of carbohydrates, especially the refined grains and sugars that are so prominent in the modern diet, causes a spike in blood sugar and a temporary energy boost. Then, because a glucose overdose is toxic in the bloodstream, insulin floods the bloodstream to remove any glucose you don’t burn immediately and stores it as either glycogen (in the liver and muscle tissues) or in the fat cells as triglyceride (the storage form of fat). When insulin removes glucose from your bloodstream and transports it into storage, you experience the familiar sugar crash and a craving for quick-energy carbohydrates. You have plenty of fat energy locked away in storage, but a high-insulin-producing diet prevents you from being able to access it. Instead, you become reliant on your next snack or meal for energy, and you exist in a state of carbohydrate dependency.”
― Mark Sisson, The Keto Reset Diet: Reboot Your Metabolism in 21 Days and Burn Fat Forever

“On the other hand, when you mismanage your genes with poor dietary habits or chronic exercise patterns, you will likely suffer from obesity (through the chronic overproduction of insulin), fatigue (poor sleep habits disturbing optimal hormone balance), and systemic inflammation and burnout (chronic production of “fight or flight” hormones in the face of unrelenting environmental stressors).”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation: A complete, step-by-step, gene reprogramming action plan

“if you have a habit of disrespecting consistent sleep time habits, you create momentum in the wrong direction and will struggle to achieve basic health and fitness goals, especially losing excess body fat.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“WE HUMANS ARE THE ONLY MAMMALS THAT SUFFER FROM CHRONIC ILL HEALTH. ONE CRITIC SUGGESTS IT’S BECAUSE WE ARE THE ONLY ANIMALS CLEVER ENOUGH TO MANUFACTURE OUR OWN FOOD—AND STUPID ENOUGH TO EAT IT.” —DR. TIMOTHY NOAKES”
― Mark Sisson, Primal Endurance: Escape chronic cardio and carbohydrate dependency and become a fat burning beast!

“carbohydrate controls insulin; insulin controls fat storage. Carbohydrates are not used as structural components in the body; instead they are used only as a form of fuel, whether burned immediately while passing by different organs and muscles or stored for later use. All forms of carbohydrates you eat, whether simple or complex, are eventually converted into glucose, which the brain, red blood cells and nerve cells generally prefer as a primary fuel.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint

“If you wish to succeed with healthy dietary habits, it’s important that you discard any negative emotions you have toward eating and embrace each meal as an opportunity to enjoy yourself. I strongly recommend that you give yourself permission to eat as much as you want, whenever you want, for the rest of your life. While this suggestion might scare the heck out of you, releasing yourself from restriction and deprivation enables you to become more connected with your physical nutritional needs rather than being driven by emotional triggers.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“MSP workouts involve full-body functional movements like deadlifts, squats, leg presses, and vertical jumps. MSP workouts feature heavy weights, few reps, and more rest. By doing a succession of mini-sets, you “go max or go home.”
― Mark Sisson, Primal Endurance: Escape chronic cardio and carbohydrate dependency and become a fat burning beast!

“nor the egg making you fat–it’s the carbs! The carbs cause high levels of insulin which steer both carbs and fat (and protein) into your fat cells.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“Maximum Sustained Power workouts are much less taxing on the cardio endurance component and instead focus on going for max power or going home. Literally, you end your mini-sets when you can’t lift the heavy bar again due to accumulated fatigue. Or, in the case of vertical jumps or calibrated exercise equipment, you stop the set when you fall materially short of your baseline absolute power performance standard that you started the workout with.”
― Mark Sisson, Primal Endurance: Escape chronic cardio and carbohydrate dependency and become a fat burning beast!

“What’s 30 or 60 or 90 days in the scope of your life?’ Experimenting with a potentially healthier approach can’t hurt, and it might just change your life!”
― Mark Sisson, Primal Endurance: Escape chronic cardio and carbohydrate dependency and become a fat burning beast!

“When insulin is high, glucagon is usually low. You don’t have energy in your bloodstream, so your brain says, “Eat now! And make it something sweet so we can burn it immediately!”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“If circumstances require that your sleep habits depart from the earth’s natural light and dark cycles, make a strong effort to sleep with an eye mask (check mindfold.com for a total darkness sleep mask) in a completely darkened room, since all of your skin cells are sensitive and responsive to light—not just your eyes.”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy

“considering all the comforts and medical advancements of modern life, we could easily argue that we currently exist in a state of devolution. For the most part, this is great (many of us have suffered illnesses or traumas over the course of our lives that would have killed us a century ago, let alone 1,000 or 10,000 years ago). However, we must be vigilant not to let the advantages of modern life compromise our health”
― Mark Sisson, The Primal Blueprint: Reprogram your genes for effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy