Host Brad Kearns offers some important tips to make your first foray into nutritional ketosis a success. As you may know, the complete Keto Reset journey entails a 21-Day Metabolism Reset, a fine-tuning period of morning fasting, followed by a minimum 6-week stint of nutritional ketosis. Regardless of your long-term keto strategy, completing a single Keto Reset journey and staying keto for at least six weeks affords you the highest level of metabolic flexibility, which you can leverage into long-term benefits. Even when well prepared, it can be tough to make it through the initial weeks of keto, since you are making such a dramatic transition from your lifelong #1 fuel source of glucose over to fat and ketones. Follow the guidelines offered in the show to make sure you succeed out of the gate and hang in to the magic six-week mark and perhaps beyond (since it gets super easy by then!)

I like intensity when I train. Lifting heavy, running sprints, playing Ultimate Frisbee. I keep it brief, and the foundation is always a lot of slow movement throughout the day—easy runs, long walks or hikes, rarely sitting—but I go hard when I “work out.”

What if you were to go slow, on purpose?

Entire schools of physical culture are founded upon slow, deliberate movements. They squash momentum and lambast rapidity. They’re difficult in a different way. They require patience and fortitude.

Take yoga.

(This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Elle Russ chats with Norm Robillard, Ph.D., Founder of the Digestive Health Institute and a leading gut health expert. He turned his own suffering from chronic acid reflux into a mission to create the drug and antibiotic free Fast Tract Diet for functional gastrointestinal disorders, small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) and related health conditions. The Fast Tract Diet was presented at the Digestive Disease Week in 2013 to provide an alternative treatment to gastroenterologists for SIBO related conditions which affect over 100 million people in the US alone. The diet has been endorsed by the New York Times Best Seller Co-author - Dr. Michael Eades, GI Surgeon - Dr. Alan Hu, many certified nutritionists and healthcare providers. Dr. Norm consults with people around the globe for their digestive and related health issues. You can download his free ebook here. 

For anyone who’s experienced it, the frustration can be miserable. The countless tossing and turning, the minutes that tick by (turning into hours), and you STILL haven’t gotten a modicum of decent sleep. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, that urge to constantly move or stretch your legs just won’t let up.

(This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Valter Longo is a leading fasting researcher. Since the early 2000s, he’s been one of the top guys running legitimate fasting studies in cancer patients, regular people, and, of course, rodents. He’s gotten great results, elucidating the idea that fasting causes human cells and tissues to enter “survival mode” which allowed them to survive the withering effects of cancer treatment. I’ve cited many of his studies in previous posts.

(This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Host Brad Kearns, leverages the previous show, by acknowledging that we don’t want to be orthorexic and uptight about dietary patterns and biofeedback numbers, but we also don’t want to exhibit a loosey-goosey, “Hey, everything in moderation” attitude where we make an excuse or rationalization for our frequent departures from ideal dietary and lifestyle patterns and from our stated goals. Living in a manner incongruent with your stated goals is a source of massive pain to the human psyche. For keto to work, you have to be methodical in your approach, patient with your progress, and precise at times when it comes to macronutrient intake and awareness of where you stand on the stated keto guidelines. However, it’s very possible to cultivate a precise approach without being uptight. This show will give you some good pointers to chill and succeed while you’re at it!

There are many reasons to be thankful for the cushy existence modernity affords us. War and other extenuating circumstances aside, you probably don’t fear for your life on a daily basis. You have clean water to drink. Food is widely available, and it’s affordable. You survived infancy, childhood, and adolescence, which is quite special on a historical scale.

(This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Last month, you asked a ton of great questions in the comment section of my post on reclaiming your wildness and being less civilized, covering everything from rock climbing to role playing games, grappling to kung fu, walking meditation to grounding. For today’s post, I’m answering as many of them as I can.

Let’s get right to the questions.

(This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Ah, chocolate. What a life.

According to the Aztecs, the great feathered serpent god of wisdom and creation known as Quetzalcoatl introduced the cocoa bean to mankind. It’s likelier that it originated in the Amazon rainforest and wound its way north to Mesoamerica, whose inhabitants figured out they could domesticate, ferment, roast, crush, and mix cocoa with water, chilies, and spices to produce a bitter, intoxicating drink. It then took a boat across the Atlantic, learning Spanish along the way. Europe wasn’t sure what to make of the bitterness until someone spilled a little sugar into the drink. Cocoa quickly swept across the continent, giving rise to large corporations that persist to this day, like Cadbury, Nestle, Hershey, and Lindt.

(This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)