Mark Sisson - Two Meals A Day: The Simple, Sustainable Strategy to Lose Fat, Reverse Aging, and Break Free from Diet Frustration Forever

I used to run almost entirely on carbs, chowing down three or four robust grain-based meals every day. I kept a reliable supply of packaged processed energy bars and other snacks in my home, car, office, and travel bag. As soon as I finished breakfast, I would start thinking about lunch. A couple of hours after my typically huge dinners, I would wander into the kitchen to nibble on something while relaxing in the evening. Because I burned so much energy with extreme endurance workouts, I never got fatunlike sedentary people with similar eating patterns. Yet even with my impressive physique and no obvious adverse health consequences, my hunger, appetite, and meal planning ran my life. I did not realize the culprits at the time, but gluten and other dietary toxins were destroying my intestinal tract to such an extent that I had to structure my running routes around bathroom locations.

Nearly two decades ago, I switched to an ancestral-style diet free from processed sugar, grains, and industrial seed oils and experienced a health awakening beyond my wildest dreams. In addition to healing my lifelong digestive dysfunction, my new eating habits meant that I was no longer dependent on food to stabilize my energy, mood, and cognitive functioning. By ditching high-carbohydrate, high-insulin-stimulating foods, I was able to access and burn stored body fat around the clock. I was almost never hungry and required far fewer calories to attain total satisfaction at every meal. It felt like an incredible gift to escape from the prison of carb dependency and transition into a new existence, one in line with our human genetic expectations for health that were honed through 2.5 million years of evolution. Contrary to modern marketing hype and the flawed science thats likely been programmed into your brain, we humans can do just fine without stuffing our faces morning, noon, and night and snacking incessantly to maintain energy between these round-the-clock feedings.

Essentially, my lifes work has boiled down to this: helping others escape lifelong carbohydrate dependency driven by the Standard American Diet (SAD) and become what I affectionately call a fat-burning beast. This is the default human metabolic state that has been hardwired into our genes but has been egregiously compromised by the overconsumption of high-carbohydrate processed foods and toxic industrial seed oils (e.g., canola, sesame, soybean, and sunflower oils), which destroy our natural ability to burn stored energy. While it may take some sustained and devoted effort to reprogram your genes away from reliance on carbs, depending on the severity of your metabolic damage, the beast within you is ready to emerge when you choose the most nutritious and satiating foods, reduce meal frequency, and unlock the amazing healing powers of fasting.

Welcome to Two Meals a Day, a simple, sustainable, highly effective strategy to help you lose excess body fat; increase energy and focus; minimize your risk of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and cognitive decline; and enjoy your maximum healthspana long, healthy, happy, high-energy life lived all the way to the end. Two Meals a Day offers a refreshing solution to the incredible frustration of carrying excess body fat. It transcends almost all the controversy and confusion over what constitutes the most healthful diet and finally does away with the pain, suffering, and sacrifice weve come to associate with dieting. Im pretty fired up as we begin this journey together, because misguided health gurus, manipulative corporate marketing techniques, and so-called experts in government, in academia, and on the all-powerful internet are perpetuating the ridiculousness and the suffering of dieting with horrible advice and a fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation of human genetics and evolutionary biology. In case you havent heard, heres the issue at hand: We eat too much of the wrong foods too often. Its making us fat, tired, sick, and its slowly but surely killing us.

Recent science has made the surprising discovery that its not laziness or lack of willpower that has made modern humans unwell but rather the hormone dysregulation caused by a daily pattern of high-carbohydrate breakfasts, lunches, and dinners along with frequent snacking and ingestion of toxic industrial oils. This pattern of eating has violently disrupted our magnificent evolutionary ability to burn stored body fat around the clock as a steady and reliable source of energy. Instead, we have become dependent on regular doses of ingested calories to fuel our busy days. The common phenomenon of feeling hangry after skipping even a single meala ridiculous notion from an evolutionary perspectiveblatantly exposes this hormone dysregulation.

Even many enlightened folks who know to stay away from processed sugars, sweetened beverages, refined grain-based foods (wheat, corn, rice, pasta, cereal), and industrial seed oils remain unhealthy and overweight because they eat and snack too much. Consider the ketogenic diet, which has risen to popularity in recent years. While many who followed a well-formulated ketogenic diet have shed fat and improved their health, the plan has also been widely misappropriated as an opportunity to stuff ones face with keto-approved high-fat meals and snacks in a misguided attempt to trigger ketone production in the liver. Weve forgotten ketos roots as an evolution-honed survival mechanism. Ketone production occurs in the liver to supply a steady source of fuel for the brain in times of starvation or in the absence of dietary carbohydrates. In reality, you access the main benefits of keto through fasting, not feasting on high-fat foods.