 And it does that by cleaving thousands upon thousands of molecules of glycogen into glucose out of the muscle for on-site usage to do this, okay? But that's why they're there. But forget that for right now, we're in a high energy state. So we're going to do this and we're going to go backwards and we're going to jam as much as we can in the muscle and as much as we can in the liver, okay? That's 270 grams. So you go to Starbucks in the morning, you get yourself a nice big bagel and a caramel latte, guess what? You've topped off your gas tank. You store it all the glycogen you can store. And that's assuming that your gas tank was empty, which it wasn't, okay? So what happens then? Well, it can't go this way and now it can't go this way. So what happens is it gets stuck at this level of fructose or phosphofructokinase. And through a metabolic process that occurs in this high energy state, fructose gets converted to something called glyceraldehyde 3-phosphate. You take three of those, link them together, and you got triglycerides. Triglycerides get mobilized in your body and stored in your body fat, which becomes an ever-expanding reservoir, okay? Well, now that you're doing this, you can only do this at a certain rate, so glucose starts to stack up in the bloodstream. Well, what's your body's response to that? Make more insulin. Well, your body doesn't want insulin to be moving glucose into the cell because it's trying to prevent it from having glycation damage. So what does it do? It decreases your number of insulin receptors on your muscle cells and other cells in your cells, except for one place. The insulin receptors on your body fat stay intact. What your body fat is, in addition to being an energy storage depot, is a mechanism of protecting yourself from glycation end products. But it only works up to a certain point. So what ends up happening here is you have developed something called internal starvation, okay? Energy is inputted, it can't go here, it can't go here, it can only go here. The glucose starts to stack up and your insulin levels get high and your insulin receptors go down everywhere except here. But the problem is, if your energy levels start to wane, you can't tap any energy out of your stored body fat because the hormone that does that, hormone-sensitive lipase, is sensitive to insulin. Insulin will not allow you to tap body fat. So when you have an elevated serum insulin, you can't mobilize body fat. So what happens is, as soon as your energy levels start to wane, you become ravenously hungry because you got to jack up your energy levels short term, but then it just does this and you can't tap it out of there. And the weirdest thing that I only noticed in the past couple of years is I've looked at hundreds of thousands of CT scans over the years. And I always had it in my head that the morbidly obese were probably pretty well muscled underneath all that because effectively they're lifting weights all the time. But it's not the case. Their muscles are extraordinarily atrophied. Your external oblique muscle that ought to be about, you know, as thick as a piece of steak. And these people is paper thin and stretched to the point of bursting. If you look at their spinal erector muscles on the cross section of the CT scan, which basically takes pictures of you like a honey baked ham slices. If you look at it, you look at the extra, I mean, you look at the lumbar extensor muscles. What should be about the size of the barrel of a baseball bat is as small as this magic marker because they are having nutrient partitioning that doesn't allow any energy to go anywhere but the body fat. So they can't support any sort of preservation of muscle mass. So they are literally starving inside an encasement of blubber. So this whole process of metabolic derangement I like to think of as a tub overflowing. And the diet Mark Sisson talked to you about is taking that overflowing tub and turning off the spigot. What I like to offer with the exercise protocol that we talk about in the book is a way to pull the drain plug because high intensity exercise does something very special. It mobilizes, remember we talked about the glycogen in the muscle. You have the greatest number of potential insulin receptors on the surface of your muscle cells. But the cool thing is if you bring a high intensity exercise stimulus to your body, then what will happen is the glucose that gets cleaved out of the muscle's glycogen is done so by what is called an amplification cascade. And there is a series of about five enzymes, all one right after the other. But the first enzyme when activated goes to the second one and can activate a thousand of those. Each one of the second ones can activate a thousand of the third ones and so on and so on. So what happens is high intensity exercise cleaves massive amounts of glycogen out of the muscle, empties it out and produces a need for insulin sensitivity to be restored on the muscle cell. And when that happens, the glucose in your blood goes down, your serum insulin levels go down and then all of a sudden this process can go this way instead of this way. And what you'll find is the synergistic effect of the two, of Mark Sisson's diet and this workout are such that your body, it's almost too easy, your body will auto-regulate towards your ideal body composition, which for most males will be 10 to 11 percent, body fat for most females about 18 percent. For a guy like Patrick, he's probably hovering around 5 percent just because that's his phenotype. But whatever is best for you, you will auto-regulate towards that. And that's the cool thing is if you do it right, this really is your birthright. This is encoded in your DNA over millions of years and it's only screwed up because of a misapplication of knowledge and technology. One of the biggest of which I want to close with here and is talk about fructose. Now, carbohydrate and glucose are part of what drove this whole problem that I just spoke to you about, but once you're in this state, that process can be amplified by our modern diet. If you take table sugar or sucrose, that's just the linkage of a glucose molecule to a fructose molecule. When you eat it, there's a sucrose enzyme in your saliva in your stomach that breaks the two apart. And the free floating fructose, when you're in this metabolic state where you can't go this way and you can't go this way and can only go this way, gets greatly amplified. Fructose has the unique capability of still getting into the cell, but it doesn't need insulin to do so. It just diffuses straight in, is acted on by PFK, and just goes straight to body fat. Now when I was a kid, that was bad because everything had sugar in it, but it was easy to identify. Your mom could pick up something and go, oh, that's got a lot of sugar in it, I'm not going to get that. No, we're not getting honeycombs, we're getting Cheerios, fill in the blank. But in 1981, Archer Daniels Midland came up with a cool invention made out of corn called high fructose corn syrup. And the problem with it is that food manufacturers that relied on sugar saw an opportunity because you got to remember, the big selling point of high fructose corn syrup is that it's manufactured. Sugar has to be grown on plantations, mostly in the Caribbean, and it's traded on a commodities market. Futures traders try to predict the future and adjust price accordingly. So when hurricane season, a storm starts to brew out in the Gulf, they all freak out, price goes up. Well, if you're making Coca-Cola in the 1980s, it doesn't matter. People still want to put 50 cents in the machine and get a Coke. But if you're cost for sugar suddenly quadruple, that's a real problem. Well, along comes ADM with the answer. So all of a sudden, you invent new Coke, and then you over-sweeten it, and then everyone hates it. You go back to classic Coke, which is the old recipe, except it's not sucrose, it's high fructose corn syrup, makes you go, hmm, I don't know whether that's true or not. But what is true is high fructose corn syrup is extremely economical to use as a sweetener in all sorts of things. And most people are already living in this state. And the problem with high fructose corn syrup is it's still a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule linked together. So it's not necessarily any more evil than table sugar, and it does come from corn, if that's a good thing. But the real problem is, is that everyone's in this metabolic state, and it is everywhere. In your coat, it's in your Gatorade, it's in your bread, it's in your pizza sauce, it's in your peanut butter, it's in every damn thing you eat. It wouldn't be such a big deal if we weren't all already in this state. So you're just taking a problem that's like a fire and you're throwing gasoline on it. That is why we have this obesity epidemic that you see in the country. We have a metabolic derangement that, for a large segment of the population you guys included, began in utero and is still going on in places where you can't even find it or detect it. So that's my spiel on the paleo diet and why you should do it. Any questions? Yes? Oh, not me. I said 15 minutes. Oh, okay. Let's do questions then. Yes, sir. Hi, Doug. How are you? Good. I, great book, I read it back in last November, I guess, or last October into November. Thank you. And then right after that I read good calories, bad calories. Since then I've been very low carb, mostly meat, high fat. It's been great. I just had a couple questions if you could elaborate, or I guess you haven't mentioned it, but if you could talk a little bit about ketone body metabolism. In particular, I guess how long it takes to adapt and how long after you've been that way for a while it takes to kind of revert back if you're on vacation eating crap, for example. And then the other one was about the brain chemistry of carbohydrate addiction. Because when I was younger I ate a ton of pasta, it got me really sick, but like at the end of the day I still crave some of those foods despite knowing that after I eat that stuff the next morning I feel like crap. Right. I kind of explained that for you. Okay, tell me the first part of the question again. Ketone body metabolism. Ketone body. Okay. Ketone bodies are a byproduct of the metabolism of fatty acids, and certain fatty acids doesn't matter which, really. But when you mobilize body fat, or when you ingest fat as a food substance, certain fatty acids when they go through this process called beta oxidation which is part of the Krebs cycle, it is the part of the Krebs cycle that uses an energy process that actually ends up generating 96 ATP. What gets thrown off of that is ketone. And ketone is acetoacetic acid or acetone, fingernail polish remover, literally, or beta hydroxybutyrate. And they are just a byproduct of that metabolism. The vast majority of it is eliminated through your body, mostly through your breath, which you can smell when you're ketotic, and in your urine, okay? That's sort of a fruity, musty odor to it. Ketone is very useful, and it was actually a byproduct of metabolism that we adapted to in our hunter-gatherer past because ketone is the only fuel other than glucose that your brain can subsist off of and function very well on. As a matter of fact, when you look at neuromotor testing of people that are in ketosis, they actually perform much better on neuromotor testing, tests of coordination and things of that nature when they are in a ketotic state. And it makes sense. In a hunter-gatherer past, if you were starting to mobilize body fat and producing ketone, it would be to your advantage if you used a fuel that made you sharper and more likely to be successful hunting and gathering. Which do you think is the default as opposed to the backup? Dr. Harris on his Palaean new blog believes that the ketone body metabolism is the default, and glucose metabolism is for survival when you're starving. It's like dire needs. So can you comment on that? Yeah. I kind of agree with that. But the important thing, though, is to not get confused ketone metabolism with fat metabolism. You're not necessarily the same, and not all the time when you're fat burning, you're going to produce significant amount of ketones. And it takes a very small amount of glucose, a very small amount of glucogenic amino acids to provide enough metabolic byproduct to keep you out of ketosis.