The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

My experience with exogenous ketones, tail and truth.

I woke up the morning of the ceremony with butterflies in my stomach.

I'd done the necessary prep.

I'd abstained from carbs the past week and food the past 24 hours.

I'd performed four consecutive full-body circuit workouts to deplete muscle glycogen and undergone a liver biopsy to confirm full depletion of liver glycogen.

I wasn't taking any chances.

Although I had extensive experience generating endogenous ketones and subsisting on my own body fat, exogenous ketones were another matter entirely. You don't want to

mess around with the Holy Sacrament without doing due diligence. Holy Sacrament? Yes. According to

ethnographic accounts from early Arctic explorers who encountered the sacred compound,

the exogenous ketone was developed by traditional people of the wintry

north. No one's quite sure where it arose first, Siberia, Greenland, Alaska, Lapland,

what they do know is that these societies revered the type 1 diabetic, a rare find in the

pre-contact Arctic. Using an admittedly grisly and cruel process, these groups would starve the tribe's diabetic

to induce ketoacidosis.

Harvest the ketone-rich urine and reduce it slowly to a ketone-rich tar over a wood fire.

Tribe shamans would dissolve the tar in pine needle tea and distribute it to members

exclusively before hunting trips, warfare, and any other activity requiring optimal, physical,

and mental function to boost energy and improve performance. As Mark Twain famously quipped,

the strongest coffee I ever had was the Laplander's piss.

So when I showed up to the small building on the edge of town on a rainy evening, I was anxious.

...