How To You Eat To Support Deep Work?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:05.000 | All right, we got a question from Jeff.

00:00:07.000 | Jeff wants to know about diet.

00:00:10.000 | Can you please discuss how you approach your diet?

00:00:13.000 | Have you experimented with what specific foods best facilitate deep work?

00:00:17.000 | And how do you balance this with realities of life?

00:00:19.000 | Jeff, I'm not super strict about this, but I would say that

00:00:23.000 | the person I default back to following on food is probably Mark Sisson.

00:00:28.000 | I like the way Mark Sisson talks about things.

00:00:32.000 | There's different ways to describe what he's talking about.

00:00:34.000 | It's keto adjacent, so he talks about metabolic flexibility.

00:00:41.000 | So it's not that you want to be in ketosis all the time,

00:00:43.000 | but you have the ability to tip over into ketosis a little bit and come back.

00:00:48.000 | But what that means for people who don't follow that type of stuff

00:00:50.000 | is not a lot of simple sugars, not a lot of carbohydrates.

00:00:54.000 | It's not carb-free, but you're not eating a ton of bread.

00:00:57.000 | You're not eating a ton of pasta.

00:01:00.000 | Healthy fats, vegetables, proteins, what you would think.

00:01:05.000 | And I've fallen back on him as a default.

00:01:08.000 | I try to eat that way to the best of my ability.

00:01:12.000 | Jesse, I know you think about this more.

00:01:15.000 | Again, my understanding of your diet is you eat once every two weeks.

00:01:18.000 | Do I have that right?

00:01:20.000 | But what do you do? What do you do for your food?

00:01:21.000 | Because you care about this more than I do.

00:01:24.000 | I'm actually just looking up Mark Sisson. I've never heard of him.

00:01:26.000 | He's jacked.

00:01:27.000 | Yeah, and he's 65 now, I think.

00:01:31.000 | I'm going to start following him.

00:01:34.000 | So do you know the Mark Sisson story?

00:01:36.000 | No.

00:01:37.000 | Okay. He's an endurance athlete.

00:01:39.000 | He was an endurance athlete.

00:01:40.000 | He was a professional triathlete when he was younger.

00:01:44.000 | And destroyed his body. He was sick all the time.

00:01:47.000 | I think he got prediabetes at some point.

00:01:49.000 | Because back then, it was like carb, carb, carb.

00:01:53.000 | And it's not like you were going to look fat if you're a professional athlete.

00:01:57.000 | You're burning it all up.

00:01:58.000 | But it was just ripping up his body.

00:02:00.000 | He was having immune responses or whatever.

00:02:02.000 | And so he shifted.

00:02:03.000 | He was one of the early sort of paleoprimal type people.

00:02:06.000 | He's like, "You know what? I'm just going to eat the junk that was around for hundreds of thousands of years."

00:02:10.000 | And he sort of switched over to no more grains, no more processed food.

00:02:17.000 | And he did that early on.

00:02:18.000 | And all of his issues went away.

00:02:20.000 | His knee problems and his joint problems and his prediabetes.

00:02:24.000 | And he got really jacked.

00:02:26.000 | He's a big guy.

00:02:28.000 | And then he started a company eventually.

00:02:29.000 | So he had an early blog called Mark's Daily Apple where he would talk about this stuff.

00:02:33.000 | And he had a cool book called The Primal Blueprint.

00:02:35.000 | Because it wasn't just about food.

00:02:36.000 | It was like you need to live like a caveman type stuff.

00:02:39.000 | He was early to that.

00:02:40.000 | But more accessible than like a Rob Wolf type.

00:02:43.000 | And then he started a company called Primal Kitchen that was doing mainly salad dressings.

00:02:49.000 | That were made with avocado oil.

00:02:52.000 | So it didn't have the junk seed oils and didn't have sugars in them.

00:02:56.000 | And so like if you liked what he was doing, he had mayonnaisees and salad dressings or whatever.

00:03:00.000 | And about four or five years ago, Kraft bought that for $200 million.

00:03:04.000 | So then he peaced out of California and he lives down on Miami Beach now.

00:03:09.000 | And is tanned and ripped and is doing well for himself.

00:03:14.000 | But anyways, I like him.

00:03:16.000 | He's accessible too.

00:03:17.000 | He doesn't get weirdly doctrinaire.

00:03:20.000 | Some people, like paleo people can get weirdly doctrinaire.

00:03:23.000 | Where they're arguing about what nuts a Neanderthal in this region of France would have had access to during the early place.

00:03:32.000 | No, he's not super doctrinaire.

00:03:34.000 | He's like guys, just don't eat a bunch of flour and sugar and crap that didn't exist.

00:03:37.000 | And healthy fats are good.

00:03:39.000 | And be outside a lot.

00:03:41.000 | And don't just be in a gym.

00:03:43.000 | He's all about play.

00:03:44.000 | And do sports and stuff with people or when you're outside.

00:03:48.000 | So that's Marxism.

00:03:50.000 | But anyway, so back to your diet.

00:03:51.000 | So once every two weeks, you eat one gallon of athletic greens.

00:03:57.000 | Is that how it works?

00:03:59.000 | You just have like a giant bucket of athletic greens that you sit there and you spend an hour and you eat it once every two weeks.

00:04:05.000 | Do I have that about right?

00:04:06.000 | Yeah, more or less.

00:04:08.000 | There's actually a good resources, Tom Brady's TV 12 book.

00:04:11.000 | They got a good chapter in there on food and diet.

00:04:14.000 | I looked at that book.

00:04:15.000 | A lot of it's like, not that it's weird, but a lot of it's about flexibility.

00:04:21.000 | It felt very specific to being like a 40-year-old quarterback.

00:04:25.000 | Yeah.

00:04:26.000 | Like aggressive work to make tendons more flexible.

00:04:29.000 | Yeah.

00:04:30.000 | There's a chapter though in there about nutrition and what he buys at the store.

00:04:33.000 | And there's some good stuff in there.

00:04:34.000 | Is that what you do?

00:04:35.000 | Yeah.

00:04:36.000 | I mean, it seems like Mark and Brady, they eat pretty much the same stuff.

00:04:40.000 | It's pretty simple.

00:04:41.000 | You just don't eat the sugar and other.

00:04:44.000 | Why is there this?

00:04:45.000 | I don't get this pushback on like the paleo world.

00:04:49.000 | There's like a huge pushback on it.

00:04:51.000 | And I think it's just personal.

00:04:53.000 | Right.

00:04:54.000 | Like the people don't like the paleo people are kind of annoying.

00:04:57.000 | And so they're like, well, we're going to dunk on you and say there was like grains of certain types that people ate or this or that.

00:05:04.000 | And the whole thing to me seems pretty crazy because what could be more self-evident than at the very least you can't possibly be doing harm by focusing mainly on foods that humans ate for a long time.

00:05:18.000 | Now, you could debate like, okay, maybe bread's not as bad as you think it is or something like this, but you can't possibly be doing harm by not eating bread because that's whatever it is, 10,000 years old or something like that.

00:05:31.000 | You can't possibly be doing harm by not eating cane sugar because we barely ate that right until recently.

00:05:40.000 | So that's what I don't get about is like.

00:05:43.000 | The pushback is if you avoid stuff that is new, you are avoiding processed food, you're avoiding sugar, you're avoiding a lot of processed carbohydrates can't possibly be bad.

00:05:56.000 | So then the debate is about like, well, maybe it's I mean, maybe not doing that isn't as bad as you think.

00:06:02.000 | Or maybe these things you're avoiding maybe aren't as bad as you're thinking. Yeah, maybe it is.

00:06:05.000 | But I think a lot of it's just they don't like how annoying, which they do get annoying.

00:06:08.000 | The paleo people get so doctrinaire and weird about it because people like to be doctrinaire and weird about things.

00:06:13.000 | But this is general idea of like, you're not going to go wrong eating, you know.

00:06:18.000 | Meats and vegetables and fruits in moderation and like roughly what you might have eaten 20,000 years ago.

00:06:26.000 | It's not gonna be unhealthy. Yeah. I mean, the food industry does such a good job of marketing.

00:06:32.000 | You walk into any grocery store like the whole middle of it is all well marketed, really good tasting stuff that's not good for you.

00:06:40.000 | And I mean, what Sisson does, I think, is he he calls it a big ass salad.

00:06:44.000 | But he just, you know, his first meal of the day, he makes a huge salad with all sorts of crap in it.

00:06:50.000 | And he has a salad dressings, which because he's all about healthy fats.

00:06:53.000 | So they're avocado oil dressings like get fat. Right. But healthy fats is a huge salad and it makes them full.

00:06:59.000 | And then he like does a good dinner. Yeah. Like we have lean steak and, you know, we broccoli and whatever, like stuff he likes.

00:07:08.000 | And like doesn't think about that much and spends a lot of time outside and exercises in various ways and hangs out with people on the beach.

00:07:15.000 | And, you know, the other thing, too, is like going to restaurants and stuff. I mean, it's hard to eat well in restaurants.

00:07:21.000 | Yeah. Any restaurant, really. I mean, the food tastes really good and super salty. Yeah. Got a lot of butter.

00:07:26.000 | Yeah. I hear you with that. All right, Jeff. So I don't know. I don't know if that was helpful.

00:07:30.000 | But at the very least, look at pictures of how ripped the 65 year old man is, because it is it's almost disturbing.

00:07:39.000 | It's like a little bit disturbing because he's old, but he's my hero from a food perspective.

00:07:45.000 | And read The Primal Blueprint. It's a cool book.

00:07:47.000 | [Music.]

How To You Eat To Support Deep Work?

Chapters