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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Sisson
Read between
May 26 - May 30, 2020
Glucose burns quickly and easily, but it also burns dirty via the excessive production of free radicals. Free radicals are the driving force behind inflammation, cancer, and accelerated aging.
Glucose is like kindling—burning quickly with lots of smoke.
(no offense, but anyone who eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day is a glutton from an evolutionary perspective),
including sugar-crash urgencies, chronic training patterns, insufficient sleep, hectic daily schedules, or difficult personal or work relationships, you are headed toward the uniquely modern affliction of burnout.
When we get the energy/concentration/mood decline and the appetite spike between (high-carb) meals, and the fat is locked away in storage due to hyperinsulinemia, we either seek more quick-energy carbs to eat or we trigger gluconeogenesis to fuel brain and muscles that are starving—literally, because insulin levels are too high to allow access to stored body fat or for the liver to generate ketones.
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
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chronic exercise, insufficient sleep, and a high-stress daily routine can push you into carb dependency nearly as much as can your food consumption.
Dr. Cate Shanahan, a family-practice physician from Connecticut, author of the acclaimed Deep Nutrition, and Los Angeles Lakers nutrition director who specializes in medically supervised weight loss through evolutionary-based eating, is lauded for her passionate crusade against refined high polyunsaturated vegetable oils and sugar. Her results with everyday patients, as well as elite professional athletes, and her ability to operate in both the traditional medical world and the progressive evolutionary health world make her a respected thought leader to a broad audience.
This anti-inflammatory effect can particularly benefit age-related chronic diseases, autoimmune conditions, and colon cancer.
Conditions of cognitive decline such as Alzheimer’s, dementia, ADHD, and autism are all characterized by inflammation and poor oxygen delivery to the brain (details shortly).
Having a powerful internal antioxidant system will boost immunity, delay aging, and protect you from cancer, neurological decline, and other degenerative diseases.
“Ketones readily cross the blood brain barrier and become a highly efficient energy source for the brain.
Ketones promote elevated neurotransmitter and enzyme function such that your capacity to fire brain neurons increases, and you preserve that capacity better through increased oxygen delivery, reduced inflammation, and fewer reactive oxygen species generated.”
By simply eating keto, you can think and perform better in real time, and can achieve a druglike neuro-protective effect against disease patterns.
most cancer cells are unable to use ketones for fuel. This is because mitochondria are required for ketones to burn (that’s why they burn so cleanly—ample oxygen is used), and most cancer cells have dysfunctional mitochondria.
First things first; resetting that dial to zero means zero tolerance for any sugars, grains, or refined vegetable oils for 21 days.
No amount of willpower can stand up to the force of dysregulated appetite hormones and hungry opioid receptors in your brain.
For your daily carb intake, you’ll want to remain under 150 grams of carbs per day during the Reset, and drop down to 50 or less when you go keto. For protein, your average daily intake should average around 0.7 grams per pound of lean body mass at all times.
even celebrity-branded salad dressings with “olive oil” in the title contain more refined high polyunsaturated vegetable oil than olive oil.
Any dairy product characterized as nonfat or low-fat is just a sugar bomb.
ELIMINATE: High polyunsaturated vegetable and seed oils (canola, corn, soybean, sunflower, safflower, etc.)
Understand that corn is a grain, not a vegetable.
Avoid packaged meat products processed with bad oils, sweeteners, and chemical additives, such as breakfast sausage patties, dinner roasts, frozen meals, and sliced lunch meats.
ELIMINATE: Energy bars; fruit bars and rolls; granola bars; protein bars; frozen breakfast, dinner, and dessert products; and packaged, grain/sugar-laden snack products.
Strange as it may sound, an 85–90 percent cacao dark chocolate bar is a more favorable option than virtually any natural energy bar.
Also eliminate sugar/sweeteners (agave,
You are trading your morning oatmeal and O.J. for a delicious omelet, and your afternoon energy bar for a handful or two of macadamia nuts.
the defining purpose of food in your life becomes that of gustatory pleasure instead of fuel for a gas tank that’s constantly teetering on the verge of empty.
Once we hit the big 4-0 or thereabouts, we sit on the sidelines, welcome in disease risk factors, and experience a dramatically accelerated decline into feeble old age.
increased general movement and avoiding stillness is arguably more important to health and weight loss than being a high-calorie-burning gym rat or road warrior.
Walking is the obvious foundational element here.
Swear off elevators and enjoy all the stairs life has to offer.
Realize that this movement objective also includes deliberate practices like yoga,
strive to accumulate a minimum of two hours of structured cardiovascular workouts (fitness walking, jogging, cycling, swimming, cardio machines, and so forth) each week.
it’s a great idea to walk (or do very slow movement of your chosen activity) for a few minutes at the beginning of a training session to ensure fat oxidation is optimized for the duration of the effort.
Two workouts per week lasting as little as seven and no longer than 30 minutes is plenty to get you really fit and strong—really!
Sprinting stimulates lean muscle development or preservation; improves energy, alertness, and mood (by improving oxygen delivery and decreasing inflammation in the brain); increases your resilience to fatigue (both mental and physiological) when you exercise at lower intensity levels; stimulates the all-important mitochondrial biogenesis; strengthens muscles, joints, and connective tissue; and can be an extremely effective catalyst to help you break through fat-loss plateaus.
When you engage in a pattern of impossible dieting, you will likely find yourself always hungry, you will commonly overeat to the point of discomfort (a survival mechanism against the combo of starvation and chronic exercise), you will still feel less energetic overall (your body doesn’t want to be energetic when you are starving and overexercising), and you will become more likely to store whatever calories you consume as fat (due to dysregulation of the prominent satiety/fat-storage hormone leptin).
Once every 7 to 10 days, and only when you are feeling fully rested and motivated to deliver a maximum effort, you can conduct a sprint workout honoring these precise guidelines:
Before your workout, do slow-paced cardio until you break a slight sweat, feel your joints lubricate, and you experience sharpened psychological focus. Spend at least 5 minutes doing a gentle warm-up.
For the most difficult activity of running, 4 to 6 sprints of 15 to 20 seconds each is plenty. Take enough recovery—in the form of slow jogging (don’t be stationary or sit or lie down!)—between your sprints
the essence of the problem is this: excess artificial light and digital stimulation after dark.
our exposure to artificial light after sunset kicks off a chain reaction of adverse hormonal events.
Artificial light and digital stimulation after dark suppress the release of melatonin, the hormone that makes us feel sleepy in the evening
In tandem, we experience a spike in the primary stress...
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Initially, cortisol floods the bloodstream with glucose, giving us a “second wind” to stay awake and finish our emails or Netflix series binge. Thus, if you stress yourself in this manner every night, chronically elevated evening cortisol can bind with the appetite...
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When nights of digital stimulation and insufficient sleep are a fixture in your life, you can become insulin resistant, meaning you are more likely to store your midnight snacks as fat, and more likely to crave sugar because you do a poor job of accessing and burning internal energy stores.
but slowing down the pace of your life and relaxing more can make you leaner, more energetic, and ultimately fitter, stronger, happier, and healthier.
If you eat 100 grams of carbs one day, you’ll shut off ketone production for a while (opinion varies on this—some experts suggest it can take several days to get back in the groove after a single carb binge!),
You can creep up and over 50 grams if you go hog wild on nuts, nut butters, 85% dark chocolate, plain yogurt, and coconut milk.
