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Summary
On episode 477 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Brad Kearns, a New York Times bestselling author, Guinness World Record speed golfer, and former professional triathlete who has worked alongside Mark Sisson to build the Primal Blueprint lifestyle, to discuss the book they co-authored, Two Meals a Day.
Kearns argues that eating six small meals a day keeps people dependent on carbohydrates for energy, while spacing meals out and letting the body tap into stored fat restores what he calls metabolic flexibility.
The conversation covers the three toxic modern foods he says do the most damage, the WHEN approach to timing meals around real hunger instead of the clock, and how short “micro workouts” spread through the day can build fitness without the burnout of traditional training.
Links
- https://twomealsadaybook.com
- https://bradkearns.com
Key Takeaways
- Humans are built to run on stored body fat, not constant carb refueling. Kearns argues that regular clockwork meals have trained our genes to depend on dietary carbohydrate for energy, when for most of human history the body relied on stored fat as its default fuel.
- Metabolic flexibility means you can take or leave a meal. When the body can readily switch between burning fat and burning glucose, skipping a meal doesn't cause a crash, and occasional indulgences don't derail you because you can return to baseline fat burning afterward.
- There are three toxic modern foods to eliminate first: refined seed oils, grains, and sugar. Kearns cites research that 71 percent of calories in the standard diet come from foods entirely absent from our evolutionary history. Industrial seed oils (canola, corn, soybean, sunflower) top the list because they impair the body's ability to burn stored fat by altering cell membranes.
- Cutting carbs before fixing fat burning backfires. If seed oils have compromised your ability to burn fat, restricting carbohydrate too abruptly triggers a stress response called gluconeogenesis, where the body converts lean muscle into glucose because it still can't access fat efficiently.
- WHEN means eating when hunger ensues naturally, not on a schedule. Rather than forcing an arbitrary 16 or 18 hour fasting window immediately, Kearns recommends easing meal times back gradually and using real hunger, signaled by ghrelin, as the cue to eat.
- Micro workouts spread fitness across the day. A minute of squats, pull-ups, or deadlifts done opportunistically, like every time you take out the trash, builds strength and breaks up damaging periods of stillness without the injury risk of an all-or-nothing training program.
- Devoted exercisers who are otherwise sedentary don't get the same protection. Kearns cites the compensation theory of exercise: people who train hard for an hour a day but sit the rest of the time can show the same metabolic disease risk as people who don't exercise at all, which is why daily movement (Mark Sisson's “JFW,” just effing walk) matters as much as formal workouts.
- A short daily anchor habit builds discipline everywhere else. Kearns has kept an unbroken five-minute (now 35-minute) morning mobility routine for over four years, using a deliberately low bar so the habit sticks and spills over into better focus the rest of the day.
- Brad's three strategies to get and stay well: start a short morning routine and keep it to five minutes until it becomes automatic; ditch the big three toxic foods (seed oils, grains, sugar) for 21 days to reset your fat burning; and don't take on too much at once, just those first two changes.
“Fasting is probably the biggest thing you can do for an immediate health boost. It beats any superfood ever known to mankind.”
Brad Kearns