Let me expand a bit by talking about a topic that might be familiar to many of you – the “habits of successful hunter-gatherers.” They’re the cornerstones of a larger vision for ancestrally inspired living, The Primal Connection. If we can learn from our forebears’ diets and activities, what wisdom can we garner or extrapolate from other elements of their living conditions – for example, their social structures and cultural patterns. Here are all ten habits – presented for the first time on MDA and repurposed for the Challenge.

Forget about whatever else you’re doing or surrounded by for a moment. Think. Imagine. What would it have taken to be a highly successful hunter-gatherer? Brawn? Speed? Good aim? Stamina? Carving skills? A sharp eye or memory? Of course. But what about those less obvious attributes like creativity, empathy, intuition, even-temper, mettle, compassion, cool-headedness? After all, all the strength in the world won’t match a good weapon in many situations. A lone wolf will always be more vulnerable on the savanna than his connected counterparts. An easygoing perspective can make living with others easier. Equanimity keeps emotional responses in check and critical focus on the present. Grit can mean the difference between life and death.

If the hard knocks of evolutionary history cultivated these types of pivotal traits in our ancestors, how do we reconnect with – and benefit from – them today? It’s an intriguing and productive question for life in general, but I think it has special significance for the Challenge. What better self-development project can there be than fostering the habits of highly successful hunter-gatherers? What could it mean, for example, for our daily lives? For our relationships? For our mental health, emotional resilience and general satisfaction? How could contemplating these habits – and applying them – affect your experience of the Challenge?

In addition to reconnecting with our natural environments, rhythms, and biomechanics, it’s impossible to discount the relevance of these more cognitive and cultural Primal “habits.” Sure, it’s the stuff that can’t be nailed down. When it comes to our ancestors’ neurological trajectories, we have the likes of skull proportions and tool complexity to compare. Beyond that, the specifics get dicey. Grok and his kin left no diaries or personal blogs. The more intimate details of their lives will never be known, as much as we might like to imagine their stories. Nonetheless, we can extrapolate from the conditions in which, we theorize, our ancestors lived and then target what skills and perspectives those environments would’ve favored for survival. (The observations of traditional societies living today add to this picture in their own partial way, but that’s fodder for another discussion.)

The idea here isn’t an academic model. Yet, it’s not tongue-in-cheek either. What we’re after, of course, is a practical point of reference for the everyday person who wants to enjoy life for all the fulfillment, happiness, and peace that he or she can find in it. There’s something to speculating about Grok’s angle on life and what we can safely assume was a striking contrast to the modern mindset that too often breeds stress, disengagement, and impatience. What’s to be gained from the perspective of Grok, our resident highly successful hunter-gatherer? Consider his evolutionary context a touchstone we can use to gauge our own sense of balance. The “10 Habits” are finally a reminder to question cultural scripts in pursuit of something more timeless and fundamental in our individual lives. The Habits challenge us to scrutinize how much we organize our lives around modern norms, which may be “normal” but not productive for us. Ultimately, perhaps, they give us license to imagine – design for ourselves, really – an ancestrally-informed point of homeostasis to thrive within each day.

Habit #1: Take Responsibility

In the era of our Primal ancestors, there was little room for finger pointing after the fact, little patience for runaway blame, little chance to avoid the direct consequences of their choices. The stakes were higher. The potential ramifications more dire. In issues of life and death, belonging or banishment, you didn’t want to tempt fate with much carelessness, much thoughtlessness or much self-pity. The easier you were to get along with and the more accepting you were of basic accountability in the here and now, the more likely you were to see tomorrow.

Taking responsibility obliges us to scrutinize our own complicity in our life’s difficulties, in the bad decisions, in the less-than-ideal circumstances. When we think about our health, our professional lives, our relationships or any other area where grievances live, what have we done/are we doing to perpetuate a miserable pattern? How have we conspired with the negative influences to get us where we’re at? Why do we continue to accept situations that genuinely don’t work for us?

That said, it’s not about chastising ourselves. Taking responsibility for our lives doesn’t call us to emotionally beat ourselves up. It doesn’t oblige us to lash ourselves for past mistakes. I think that approach is in its own way a skirting of and distraction from real responsibility. Punishment (whether inflicted by oneself or another) doesn’t leave genuine room for responsibility; it holds the process hostage – and the people (or single person) caught in its distorting lair.

Maybe we really did get a raw deal – in childhood, in the job market, in our first marriage, in that bout with cancer. Taking responsibility doesn’t mean forgetting the past or turning over all awareness of the difficulties we’ve faced. I think it’s more a question of owning our lives – for all their mixed circumstances. We put ourselves in right orientation with our responsibility – taking what’s ours (and, importantly, giving back what’s not ours – letting others have the dignity as well as consequences of their own authority).

When you stop distracting yourself with what belongs to other people, you can focus on your own life. When you own where you’re at in said life, you’re empowered to move forward in it. When you place power in your life elsewhere (e.g. other people, a work place, etc.), however, you’ve chosen to relinquish that power. You’ve given it away.

True, we can’t control every medical event. We can’t legislate others’ actions or responses to our choices. Yet, we can accept the basic circumstances and commit to driving our lives forward from that point rather than staying stuck in a place of regret and longing.

The fact is, bitterness breeds inertia. Blaming allows us to languish in the comfort of bad habits. It encourages us, in fact, to stay stuck smack dab in that lulling space of woe-is-me martyrdom. In that way, blame will betray us every time. Victimhood blocks any chance at greater vision. Excuses stand in for action. The result, we spend life in a stifling cul-de-sac.

Habit #2: Be Selfish

In our ancestors’ day, there was certainly a sense of obligation to the group, an expectation of contribution to the joint welfare. That said, in an economy of ample free time, a social network of extended kin, a culture nearly devoid of material ambition, no one was likely required or motivated to drive themselves to exhaustion.

I believe the “pack mule” mentality is a thoroughly modern neurosis. Why would any single person in a band ever accept grossly inordinate proportions of responsibility in our Primal ancestors’ time? With all members free to leave at any time in the natural ebb and flow of band to band interchange, why would any of them lived a wretched life of literal or approximated servitude? If you ran yourself into the ground healthwise in evolutionary times, you put yourself at risk. You were a liability to the group. What was the possible benefit?

Yet, here we are in modern times making excuses for neglecting our health, giving away the chance (and true responsibility) for reasonable self-care and personal fulfillment. Part of the logic is the modern focus on the future. We’re planners, sacrificers for the sake of a presumed future security. It’s amazing what we’ll give up in the interest of a vision twenty years out. The result? We live in a kind of chronic self-debt. We’re seeking to serve ourselves, but we’re distorted in the extremeness of the terms.

This flies in the face of our ancestors’ culture of immediacy. There’s something to that living in the here and now rather than for the sometime-down-the-road. I think it’s possible to balance the two for the benefit of both, but it’s a deal with the devil to think we can continually neglect ourselves for the people and projected future of our lives. Our sense of balance must demand current and continual well-being for ourselves. When we are nourished and sustained today, we have more to offer to those around us and to our futures.

Habit #3: Build a Tribe

Our ancestors depended upon a tight knit social circle. Their survival hinged upon it, in fact. The band community of 25-50 people was forged within a sense of mutuality – action for the good of the group. It was more than simple transaction, larger than familial connection (not everyone was related). You became kin by being kin and sharing in the menial work, the ongoing stories, and the meaningful celebrations of the band.

In this day and age, we live in proximity to numbers that would’ve stunned our ancestors. We count our social media “friends” into the hundreds, but we often miss a sense of close, constant connection. Exposure doesn’t fill our social wells. Neither do status updates.

These days we can go through our adult lives with few, if any, intimate relationships – the kind of connections that feel like kin – our own tribe. You’ve seen each other through transitions, successes, and disappointments. You have history and your own stories. The fact is, we haven’t outgrown or out-evolved the need for kin. We live with the same genes that benefited from social connection and the same biochemistry that rewards it. With frequent relocations and busy lives, connecting gets complicated. Too many of us end up socially adrift.

If you find yourself at this point in your life without a core group, build one. Don’t make the excuse that you just missed the boat. It’s just too important. You’ll be glad you didn’t later. Feed this “highly successful” habit by first deepening the relationships you already have. When you begin seeing your partner, family members, kids, and closer friends as your tribe, you gain a whole new level of appreciation for the role they play in your life. Reconnect with old friends, and test the waters to see if there’s potential there to become close again. Get out into the world, meet people, and make an invitation. Invite a coworker for lunch. Join a book group orbasketball league. Start a volunteer team at your house of worship or place of work. Create a Meetup group. Host an open house for the neighbors. Over time, cultivate the relationships that seem most genuine and promising. Cultivate that mutuality in small but significant ways. Bring your best to the friendship and expect the same in return.

Habit #4: Be Present

We can all do a self-inventory now of the attention we give our phones or other technological devices. We can confess to ourselves how much we let residual work infiltrate our personal lives. Don’t forget what I think is one of our biggest trip-ups in modern living: the penchant for mental chatter. Truth be told, how much time do we spend caught up in replaying a conversation from the previous evening, imagining multiple stressful scenarios that might take place when we confront a certain person about x, y, and z, worrying about what other people think of our outfit or hair today? Let’s face it, our modern disconnect is rampant distraction.

Can you imagine if Grok walked across the savanna perpetually lost in thought about his latest wardrobe experiment? (As if he ever saw his reflection anyway…) He wouldn’t last long enough for it to matter. For our ancestors, life was an exercise in continual hyper-vigilance. Not every second, but close. It wasn’t just the risk of becoming another creature’s dinner either. Attentiveness also meant watching for weather, catching migratory patterns, and deciphering water sources – just to name a few examples.

The Primal Connection is to be found in giving the moment your full attention. It’s about minding the difference between thoughtful deliberation or reflection and so-called monkey brain. It’s about throwing off the strangling self-absorption we trap ourselves in every day standing in line with our phones or with our mental chatter. See the people, places, and possibilities in front of you. Feed this “highly successful” habit by observing your loved ones – all the changes and uniqueness that’s right there to be appreciated. Go on a walk with the goal of finding at least a dozen things you’ve never noticed. Use mindfulness check-ins to remember to come down from the mental busyness and come back to center throughout the day.

Habit #5: Be Curious

The thing about us hominids, is this. We think. We imagine. We create. We explore. We experiment and extrapolate. We’re driven to go around yet another corner of the path. We’ll push the envelope continually because it feels good to do it. It’s how we got ahead in the evolutionary game, how we’re so vastly successful after all. The wheel didn’t invent itself. Neither did all the continents come knocking at the door of the African savannah. You get the point.

Fast forward to today, and we’re a tale of contradiction. As a species we’ve advanced to the outer edges of the solar system. As individuals, however, our daily lives might not appear so inspiring. The thing is, we’re so ungodly busy. We’ve got filled calendars, packed schedules, pocket-sized devices and big screen distractions to keep us occupied and then some.

In the midst of running errands, doing chores, working our hours and keeping up with Facebook, we’re pretty much spent. We’re caught in the day-to-day grind and can’t find a way out. We get stuck in the details. Life becomes a task rather than a discovery. We’re wasting our own hard-won evolutionary gifts in service of – what was it supposed to be?

It’s important to allow yourself your full humanity – to cultivate it, to give it air on a frequent basis. That’s exactly how it is with curiosity. It’s not so much another to-do. It’s more a force that will operate when you you let it. It’s necessary, however, to clear out the mental and logistical clutter that keep it buried, stagnant. The more spaciousness we allow in our lives, the more freely curiosity can operate in our lives.

So many of us have overloaded ourselves for so long, we’ve forgotten what even interests us, what we have a passion for, what piques our curiosity. I’m not talking spontaneous clicks on an Internet “best dressed” list for the latest awards ceremony or the (legitimately entertaining but fleeting) interest in what will happen in the final episode of Breaking Bad. I’m talking about the enriching hobbies, the life passions, the exploratory big questions that draw us in. I’m talking about the grand inquiries that help drive or define our lives. Stop for a minute: do you have any? There’s where to start.

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A few years back, my general manager and editor hurt his back deadlifting. He found the only way he could comfortably work at a desk was to stand. It worked really well for him, even offering benefits above and beyond the improvements in lower back pain – stuff like improved energy levels and increased focus and cognition. Once his back recovered, he continued to stand because of these benefits. It eventually spread to the rest of us at Mark’s Daily Apple and Primal Blueprint, prompting me to devote an entire post to standup workstations.

The first standup desk at our headquarters was cobbled together using a stack of shipping boxes laid flat, but, as the video shows, we’ve improved on it. And, as more of our workers have taken up the practice, we’ve realized that while standing in one place all day may be better than sitting in one place all day, it’s not ideal. Man was neither meant to stand nor sit in place. You stand long enough and you start resting on the desk, leaning forward or to either side and picking up some other bad habits. Some research even indicates that standing at a desk all day comes with certain risks of its own, including increased risk of varicose veins and carotid artery damage. Now, we think in terms of the mobile workstation, and emphasize changing things up throughout the day (i.e. sitting, standing, and walking).

In that vein, we’ve brought in treadmill desks. My favorite is the TreadDesk, a standalone treadmill that fits underneath most desks. It’s just the tread; no podium, no handles, no bulky set-up. Super simple. You walk while you work at the computer. Some folks do around 1.5 miles per hour, others can handle a little over 2 mph, but the most comfortable range seems to lie between 1.5 and 1.8 mph. Every worker gets a TreadDesk if they want one and if it makes sense for their job.

The real beauty of the treadmill desk is that you never feel that incessant need to workout tugging at the back of your mind. Since you’ve already done 5, 6, 7 miles at work, you don’t necessarily have to find time to trudge off to the gym. You can relax, unwind, and spend time with friends and family after work. It doesn’t replace exercise, but it certainly takes the edge off it.

If a TreadDesk doesn’t work or make sense for someone, I encourage frequent movement: walking, squatting, pushups, pullups (there’s even a bar in the office), a light jaunt outside in the Malibu sun. The key is to break up the stasis. Even just five minutes every two hours is plenty.

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Well, gluten-free is clearly more popular than ever. More and more people are becoming aware of it. Google searches for “gluten” have been trending higher month over month for years, while the number of searches for “celiac” has plateaued. 30% of American adults are actively trying to reduce or eliminate gluten from their diets, according to a recent poll. Gluten-free dating sites are popping up to help gluten-free dieters match up with people who share their situation. The FDA’s just weighed in with some official standards for gluten-labeling. It’s everywhere, in other words. It’s arrived. It’s popular. And whenever anything gets popular, people immediately begin hating it. I’m not sure why that is, really, but it’s a known human phenomenon. Couple that with your already annoying co-worker droning endlessly on about this new diet she’s on, and I can see how someone might get a bit annoyed at all the gluten-free talk.

But is the vitriol really necessary? Does its popularity invalidate it as a legitimate therapeutic option for people with a sensitivity or downright intolerance to gluten? Should incurious cynics masquerading as skeptics be so quick to dismiss it?

Okay, maybe sometimes people can be a bit evangelical about avoiding gluten, and that’s unpleasant. And sometimes, people can’t give you a straight answer when you grill them on exactly why they’re avoiding gluten. I’d wonder why you felt it was your place to “grill them” in the first place, of course, but there is that subset of the population who takes umbrage at people making health decisions without conducting randomized controlled trials, being able to cite research by memory, and consulting the authorities.

I’ll also admit that the prospect of marketers taking over and appropriating the movement for their own benefit concerns me. For many people, a “gluten-free” label unfortunately bestows a cachet of health onto whatever processed food it graces. Potato chips? They’re gluten-free! Triple-chocolate brownie mud slide fudge-topped soy flour locust bean gum explosion? Gluten-free! Eat without guilt! Gluten-free bread that makes up for the lack of gluten’s texturizing power with a half cup of soybean oil? Go for it! Even foods that never contained gluten in the first place, like Cheetos, and hummus, are getting the gluten-free label to capitalize on the trend.

On one hand, it’s like the fat-free labeling craze, where you had fat-free cookies with twice the sugar, fat-free yogurt with thrice the sugar, fat-free salad dressing with whatever sorcery they incorporated to make that possible. And people ate those things with willful abandon, confident that “fat-free” was a synonym for “healthy” – and obesity rates continued to rise. Heck, the fat-free movement most likely exacerbated America’s obesity problem. I can understand why people who mistrust food marketing would be skeptical of gluten-free in general.

Of course, there is an important difference that distinguishes gluten-free from other faddish, market-driven diets: you don’t actually need gluten-free products to go gluten-free. The fat-free movement turned people off of legitimately healthy nutrient-dense foods like beef, eggs, butter, nuts, avocados, and olive oil just because they contained fat, whereas going gluten-free doesn’t remove a vital, essential nutrient or food. In fact, it can even increase your intake of nutrients, assuming you replace the gluten-containing foods with naturally gluten-free meat, fish, fruits, vegetables, and nuts rather than gluten-free junk food. In my experience, gluten-free consumers are more informed about health in general and do the former.

Amidst all the marketing speak, the gluten-free water, the gnashing of teeth upon discovering that the person you’re talking to avoids gluten, real science is being done, and any honest, literate person who looks at the available evidence on the health effects of gluten will admit that there’s something to this “fad.” And yet, I’m increasingly struck by the unwillingness of intelligent people to acknowledge the reams of research coming out every week exploring the effects of gluten on non-celiacs.

It couldn’t be that non-celiac gluten sensitivity is real and we don’t know how many people actually have it as the epidemiology is too new and underdeveloped. It can’t possibly be that gluten-free diets might reduce adiposity/inflammation via epigenetic effects (potentially reaching across generational lines). There’s no way that gluten free diets help non-celiac IBS patients who had no preconceived notions of gluten-free dieting (and thus no risk of being influence by the hype). And that case study of the child with type 1 diabetes going into remission with a gluten free diet? Let’s just sweep that under the rug and completely forget about it. Oh, what about the link between autism and non-celiac gluten sensitivity? Doesn’t exist. PubMed is a liar. Those autistic kids with GI symptoms who do respond positively to a gluten-free diet? They don’t, and the study you just thought you read is a figment of your imagination. All that hubbub about modern dwarf wheat being more allergenic than ever is also nonsense. Besides needing a stool to reach the top shelf, modern wheat is totally identical to older wheat and is no more allergenic.

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Other than saturated fat, I can’t think of a nutrient that’s been so universally maligned and demonized as salt. All the experts hate it and recommend that we get as little of it as possible. They even all seem to have their own little anti-salt slogans. The American Diabetes Association recommends between 2300 and 1500 mg of sodium per day (“Be Sodium Savvy“). The American Heart Association wants you eating less than 1500 mg per day (“Shaking the Salt Habit“) and claims that 97% of young people already eat way too much salt. The other ADA – the American Dietetic Association – also recommends between 2300 and 1500 mg, but their slogan is far inferior (“Slice Your Sodium Intake“). It’s quite the pile-on, isn’t it?

Why does salt strike mortal terror into the hearts of so many?

Back in the 1980s, a massive global study of salt intake and blood pressure called INTERSALT was undertaken. Overall, it showed a modest association between the two, but some groups, particularly the undeveloped, non-industrial peoples who had very little access to salt (and other trappings of industrialization), had blood pressure that was generally extremely low. Foremost among these groups were the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest. The Yanomami have very low sodium excretion, which indicates very low sodium intake, and very low blood pressure. Even the elderly Yanomami enjoyed low blood pressure. This was convincing. I mean, it sounds convincing, right? Low salt intake, low lifelong incidence of hypertension – how much more cut and dry can you get? This low salt/low blood pressure connection seemed to also apply to other groups who happened to be living more traditional ways of life.

Except that there’s another non-industrialized group (and you only need one) whose slightly different results kinda muck up the Yanomami argument: the Kuna of Panama.

Among the Kuna, a tribe native to Panama, both salt intake and blood pressure were also historically low well into old age. To study whether the two variables were linked, researchers examined a group of “acculturated” Kuna with ample access to salt and an otherwise strict adherence to their traditional way of life. Little changed but the salt intake, in other words. But, despite consuming an average of 2.6 daily teaspoons of salt (and sometimes up to 6 teaspoons), the Kuna did not have hypertension, not even in old age. There was no change between the hypertensive statuses of 20 year old Kuna and 60 year old Kuna.

All in all, drastic reduction of sodium can reduce blood pressure by a few points. The evidence is pretty consistent on that. But the example of the Kuna shows that there’s way more to blood pressure than how much salt you eat, like how much potassium you eat.

Consider two recent Cochrane meta-analyses. The first, on sodium restriction and blood pressure, found that for people with hypertension the mean effect of sodium restriction was -5.39 mm Hg for systolic blood pressure and -2.82 mm Hg for diastolic blood pressure. In normotensive people, the figures were -2.42 mm Hg and -1.00 mm Hg, respectively. Decent reductions, I suppose, but what aboutpotassium and blood pressure?

The upper intake of potassium was associated with over a 7-point drop in systolic blood pressure and a 2-point drop in diastolic blood pressure, but only in people with hypertension (the people who actually should lower blood pressure). Unfortunately, the official recommendations for sodium and potassium intake cannot be met simultaneously. Yep – the experts want you to eat in a way that is literally impossible to accomplish. Inspires confidence, doesn’t it?

Let’s forget about blood pressure for a second, because there’s also way more to health than the meager drops in blood pressure afforded by sodium restriction. Recent evidence suggests that for many people, all out salt reduction has an overall negative impact on several other aspects of health:

In 2011, one study showed that seven days on a low salt diet increased insulin resistance in healthy men and women when compared to a higher-salt diet.

Another study showed that while reducing salt moderately improved the blood pressure of hypertensive patients by a mere 4.18 and 1.98 points for systolic and diastolic, respectively (but not of people with normal blood pressure), it also had negative effects on multiple other health markers, including increased triglycerides and LDL and elevated stresshormones.

Another 2011 study found that eating a low salt diet (under 3 grams of sodium per day, or just over a teaspoon of salt) and a high salt diet (from 6-7 grams of sodium per day, or well over two teaspoons of salt) both increased the risk of stroke and heart attack, while eating between four and six grams of sodium, or about two teaspoons of salt, each day was associated with the lowest risk of cardiovascular incidents.

A recent study found that salt intake followed a J-curve, with low and high intakes increasing arterial plaque formation and a medium intake decreasing it.

Sodium depletion due to “low-sodium nutrition” has been shown to trigger overtraining-like symptoms, including hypertension and sleeping disorders.

The greatest health marker of all – being alive – also has an interesting association with salt intake. It seems that, time and time again, folks with a “medium” salt intake live longer than people who eat too little salt or too much salt. That amounts to roughly 4000 mg of sodium, or close to two teaspoons of regular salt.

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Listen to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson

The Best of Mark Sisson

A few weeks back, I discussed nine (more) reasons you might not be losing the weight you want, and I got a lot of responses. Those were mostly “physical” reasons grounded in physiological terms we usually use to describe weight loss or gain. In other words, they were the ones you expect, things like eating too little and tanking the metabolism, suffering from “hidden stress,” disordered eating, or training too hard with inadequate nutrition. Today, I’m doing something a bit different. Instead of couching everything in the body, I’m focusing more on the ways in which our minds (which, of course, are part of the body, but we typically separate the two in common parlance) trip us up and prevent us from losing weight.

Let’s jump into it.

You’ve Developed Poor Habits

Habits become ingrained in our days and in our brains to the point where it just doesn’t feel right without them. Now, if your habits take the form of regular exercise, eating plants and animals, and getting good sleep, you’re in good shape. If your habits look a little different, you might not be:

The coffee and crueller (stat!) on the way to work. The handful of candy beans every time you pass the candy-loving receptionist’s desk. The nightly six pack. The propensity to plop down on the couch and stay there for hours after work. We’ve all got some bad habits, and depending on their composition, they can disrupt our ability to lose weight.

It’s easy to recognize our bad habits, but it’s tough to break the cycle using sheer willpower. Instead, try to understand the underlying contexts that give rise to the habits. That way, you can target the contexts – the situations, the emotions, the cues – that trigger the habit.

It could be as simple as taking a different route to the bathroom to avoid the receptionist’s candy-laden desk, or it could be as hard as examining why you feel the need to drink six beers at night.

You can also replace the bad habit with a good one. If you’re craving that morning pastry, eating a piece of sweet fruit instead might be easier than just going without altogether.

I recommend The Power of Habit for those looking to learn more about habits, how to break bad ones and create new ones.

You’re Afraid of Being a Social Pariah

We are social animals. In fact, acknowledgement and indulgence of that fact is crucial for maintaining and supporting personal health. It’s the rare person who can live without social contact with other humans and remain happy and healthy. That innate drive to be accepted by and avoid offending those around us, however, can also keep us from making the right dietary choices when those around us are constantly bringing cookies into the office, going out to eat at the Chinese buffet, ordering wings and fries at happy hour, and so on.

There’s no easy way to relish social pariahism, although I think a healthy dose of it leads to superior health (more for being independent/your own man/woman than for any dietary advantages it confers). You can’t just decide to be happy about being the weird person who turns down the birthday cake. You can, however, decide to be the weird person who turns it down. Sometimes there’s no easy way around the hurdle, no strategic path. Sometimes you just have to bull your way through it and bear the consequences. Like running hurdles on the track, scaling this particular psychological hurdle gets easier the more you do it. Turn down the cake a few times and you’ll realize that it’s not so bad after all and people really don’t care.

Just don’t make a big deal out of it when you say no. Don’t get indignant or lecture-y.

You Still Fear Fat

Years of indoctrination from mass media, your family, doctors, “experts,” and pretty much everyone can have you convinced that fat is a scary, inherently dangerous macronutrient – even if you can intellectually accept its place in the human diet. No matter how many studies you read exonerating dietary fat as the cause of heart disease and obesity and diabetes and how many success stories you hear from people who ate fat to lose fat, there may always be a voice deep down inside saying “you know that stuff will kill you, right?” Even though you know it’s not anything to worry about and a high-fat diet actually can be incredibly healthy, the animal instinct is strong and stubborn. And yet if you don’t shake that fear of fat even as you reduce your carbohydrates, you’ll end up on a low-carb, low-fat, overall low energy diet that won’t get you anywhere but stuck and stalled.

It’s tough to shake indoctrination, but it can be done. Read GCBC, at least the first half that deals with the diet-heart hypothesis to have your fear ripped asunder to be replaced with a strong yearning for butter. Read the success stories on this very site from people who ate lots of fat and lost weight, improved their blood markers, and lowered their risk of developing heart disease. Taken together, clinical research and personal anecdote combine to form a powerful de-conditioning agent.

You Eat for Comfort

Comfort eating has an initial utility, I’ll admit. If you’re stressed out and can’t handle the situation, eating something that comforts you and lowers stress can be helpful, regardless of the nutritional composition of the food in question. However, if that becomes a habit, if you find yourself eating fried chicken and waffles four nights a week in order to make yourself feel better, your weight loss will almost assuredly halt – or reverse itself altogether, leading to an entirely different kind of “feeling bad.”

The problem is the stress, not the food. If you just keep switching up the food without addressing the root cause, you’ll never truly break through. You need to figure out what’s stressing you out and then take steps to reduce or mitigate it. If that means taking specific steps, like avoiding a particularly caustic personality in your life or switching jobs at the first available opportunity, so be it. It might also require taking a more general approach to stress reduction, like daily meditation, a morning walk, or some time in nature. Better yet, take both specific and general steps.

You’re Stuck on What Worked at First Even Though It’s Not Working Anymore

The initial weight loss is a rush. It comes so quickly and so effortlessly (for many people) that people often assume that doing whatever caused that first big burst of change will work in perpetuity. They become wedded to the initial method, even as it stops working. People tend to do that – to identify strongly with a belief or a group, especially if it’s generally worked very well for them. This identification often persists even when it stops working, or stops working quite so smoothly. It’s “normal” human behavior, but it can still be counterproductive or even destructive.

Maybe early on you didn’t have to think about caloric content, but now you should consider it.

Maybe early on you didn’t have to exercise much beyond walking, but now you could really benefit from more.

Maybe early on you didn’t have to worry about anything but diet, but now you should explore the other important aspects of Primal life.

Read the rest of the article

Listen to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson

10. Check out the local real estate.

Walking through your neighborhood (or any neighborhood you admire) is a natural workout that is also an effective way to clear your head and reflect on the day. I get a 45-minute walk in while my son is at his music lesson. If you’re tired of walking around your own ‘hood, explore one you’ve been curious about. You just might find a good scoop on real estate while you’re at it.

9. Hike.

Hikes don’t have to be intensive all-day expeditions (though this is a very primal thing to do). Most towns have well-maintained, short hiking trails available nearby if you simply do some digging. Even a brisk walk around the local park is energizing. Make a point of getting out into the fresh air and soaking up a little vitamin-D-recharging sunlight as often as you can. I think 20 or 30 minutes daily of fresh air and light exposure is essential for good health – so do it as often as you can. A “hike” doesn’t need to kill you for days afterwards; an hour and a local hill are all you need.
weeds

8. Beach games.

If you’re near a lakefront or beach, invest 20 bucks in a good array of Nerf balls, Frisbees and other amateur sports equipment for some carefree physical fun with the family or your buddies. Do this once a week and it’ll feel like socializing instead of a workout (we’ve been doing Sunday group workouts like Frisbee and it’s been a blast). That’s really the whole message I want to reinforce here: exercise is a natural, enjoyable, and refreshing part of life, not another relentless chore on your to-do list. Reframe your mental image of exercise and watch your health improve.

7. Play with the kids.

Nothing beats quality time with your kids. Rough house, toss around a baseball, visit the local pool, have a water balloon fight in the backyard, get into a pillow fight (careful on the last one, dads). Physical play is a bonding activity that doesn’t even feel like exercise.

6. Rearrange the furniture.

Periodically rearranging your furnishings is great for your mental health, but it’s also a good physical workout. Obviously you wouldn’t do this every week, but if you haven’t given your digs a refresh in a while, try it. All that pushing and pulling is a phenomenal weight-bearing workout session that the gym rats tirelessly replicate. You’ve got your own “gym” at home (and talk about a great way to clear your head and get into the moment).

Read the rest of the article

Recently by Mark Sisson: 13 Healthy Ways To Begin the Day

10. Check out the local real estate.

Walking through your neighborhood (or any neighborhood you admire) is a natural workout that is also an effective way to clear your head and reflect on the day. I get a 45-minute walk in while my son is at his music lesson. If you’re tired of walking around your own ‘hood, explore one you’ve been curious about. You just might find a good scoop on real estate while you’re at it.

9. Hike.

Hikes don’t have to be intensive all-day expeditions (though this is a very primal thing to do). Most towns have well-maintained, short hiking trails available nearby if you simply do some digging. Even a brisk walk around the local park is energizing. Make a point of getting out into the fresh air and soaking up a little vitamin-D-recharging sunlight as often as you can. I think 20 or 30 minutes daily of fresh air and light exposure is essential for good health – so do it as often as you can. A “hike” doesn’t need to kill you for days afterwards; an hour and a local hill are all you need. weeds

8. Beach games.

If you’re near a lakefront or beach, invest 20 bucks in a good array of Nerf balls, Frisbees and other amateur sports equipment for some carefree physical fun with the family or your buddies. Do this once a week and it’ll feel like socializing instead of a workout (we’ve been doing Sunday group workouts like Frisbee and it’s been a blast). That’s really the whole message I want to reinforce here: exercise is a natural, enjoyable, and refreshing part of life, not another relentless chore on your to-do list. Reframe your mental image of exercise and watch your health improve.

7. Play with the kids.

Nothing beats quality time with your kids. Rough house, toss around a baseball, visit the local pool, have a water balloon fight in the backyard, get into a pillow fight (careful on the last one, dads). Physical play is a bonding activity that doesn’t even feel like exercise.

6. Rearrange the furniture.

Periodically rearranging your furnishings is great for your mental health, but it’s also a good physical workout. Obviously you wouldn’t do this every week, but if you haven’t given your digs a refresh in a while, try it. All that pushing and pulling is a phenomenal weight-bearing workout session that the gym rats tirelessly replicate. You’ve got your own “gym” at home (and talk about a great way to clear your head and get into the moment).

Read the rest of the article

Listen to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson

The Best of Mark Sisson

In the midst of topical wound ointment, baby wearing, and gynoid fat, sometimes it’s nice to just back up and focus on the basics. How much more fundamental does it get really than getting up in the morning? I think we can safely count it as square one. Whether you’re stopping by today as a Primal newbie or old timer, most of us need the reminder at some point. Ah, morning. It’s an alternately grim and comical scene in most American households. There’s the snooze parade, rumpled faces, chronic grouchiness, catatonic showers, coffee frenzy, mad dashes, and neon colored breakfast with cartoon characters (fun prize included!). We’re quite a species to behold at 6:30 a.m. What can we do to change this picture? Is there such a thing as a Primal morning short of rising from a sleeping bag in a remote corner of mountain wilderness? You decide. A more approachable goal this morning might be this: what can make the morning feel – and be – a little healthier and happier?

Drink Water

I don’t buy the eight glasses a day commandment. I think water is overrated in fact. Nature gave us a sensation called thirst for a reason, and for most of us it tends to work pretty well. That said, after eight hours of total abstinence, your body could use the liquid. I see people down two to three cups of coffee, when they were probably more thirsty than insufficiently caffeinated. Maybe a productive rule would be this: water first, then coffee or tea if you want it.

Wake Up to Natural Light

In the midst of topical wound ointment, baby wearing, and gynoid fat, sometimes it’s nice to just back up and focus on the basics. How much more fundamental does it get really than getting up in the morning? I think we can safely count it as square one. Whether you’re stopping by today as a Primal newbie or old timer, most of us need the reminder at some point. Ah, morning. It’s an alternately grim and comical scene in most American households. There’s the snooze parade, rumpled faces, chronic grouchiness, catatonic showers, coffee frenzy, mad dashes, and neon colored breakfast with cartoon characters (fun prize included!). We’re quite a species to behold at 6:30 a.m. What can we do to change this picture? Is there such a thing as a Primal morning short of rising from a sleeping bag in a remote corner of mountain wilderness? You decide. A more approachable goal this morning might be this: what can make the morning feel – and be – a little healthier and happier?

Drink Water

I don’t buy the eight glasses a day commandment. I think water is overrated in fact. Nature gave us a sensation called thirst for a reason, and for most of us it tends to work pretty well. That said, after eight hours of total abstinence, your body could use the liquid. I see people down two to three cups of coffee, when they were probably more thirsty than insufficiently caffeinated. Maybe a productive rule would be this: water first, then coffee or tea if you want it.

Wake Up to Natural Light

Once again, reduce your dependence on caffeine by stimulating yourself biochemically with plan old light. Sunlight is ideal, but turn on the all the lamps (full spectrum bulbs are best) if you’re up before the sun. Unlike caffeine, there’s no impending energy crash waiting for you in a couple hours. If you can, use natural light to wake yourself with open curtains (unless outside artificial light will disturb your sleep at night) or a progressive light “alarm.”

Spend Fifteen Minutes (or More) Outdoors

Even if it’s pitch black when you roll out of bed, try to get some time in before you leave for the day or get sucked into your at-home household/work routine. Enjoy your breakfast outside, shovel the walk now rather than later, throw the ball for your dog, water your garden in your bathrobe (the neighbors can deal with it), or take a walk.

Move

For me, there’s just no substitute for a morning walk. It’s something I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Nothing wakes me up, relaxes me, and focuses my thinking in quite the same way. That said, any kind of movement can energize you naturally and boost your circulation. Who doesn’t want to begin the day with an endorphin rush? Getting your workout in first thing means you won’t be tempted to skip it later when a meeting runs late, you have an event to attend, or you just want to chill out at the end of the day. If you can’t bring yourself to workout or walk, do whatever you can: lunges while you brush your teeth, calf raises while you eat your breakfast, stretches while you wait for the shower to warm up. Anything will always be better than nothing.

Meditate

For some, it’s cultivating quiet composure on a favorite pillow. For others, it’s an invigorating yoga routine. It can be working with affirmations, prayers, relaxation techniques, or mindfulness exercises. However it works for you, you’ll begin the day with a biochemical advantage that will hold stress at bay more effectively.

Play

I know, I know. Morning minutes are precious. You don’t have time for fooling around. If you want to set a relaxed, creative path for the day, however, you’d do well to leave a little extra time for the wholly non-utilitarian. Rough house with the kids, play with your dog, do some doodling, or stop by the park on your morning run and hit the swings.

Read the rest of the article
Once again, reduce your dependence on caffeine by stimulating yourself biochemically with plan old light. Sunlight is ideal, but turn on the all the lamps (full spectrum bulbs are best) if you’re up before the sun. Unlike caffeine, there’s no impending energy crash waiting for you in a couple hours. If you can, use natural light to wake yourself with open curtains (unless outside artificial light will disturb your sleep at night) or a progressive light “alarm.”

Spend Fifteen Minutes (or More) Outdoors

Even if it’s pitch black when you roll out of bed, try to get some time in before you leave for the day or get sucked into your at-home household/work routine. Enjoy your breakfast outside, shovel the walk now rather than later, throw the ball for your dog, water your garden in your bathrobe (the neighbors can deal with it), or take a walk.

Move

For me, there’s just no substitute for a morning walk. It’s something I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Nothing wakes me up, relaxes me, and focuses my thinking in quite the same way. That said, any kind of movement can energize you naturally and boost your circulation. Who doesn’t want to begin the day with an endorphin rush? Getting your workout in first thing means you won’t be tempted to skip it later when a meeting runs late, you have an event to attend, or you just want to chill out at the end of the day. If you can’t bring yourself to workout or walk, do whatever you can: lunges while you brush your teeth, calf raises while you eat your breakfast, stretches while you wait for the shower to warm up. Anything will always be better than nothing.

Meditate

For some, it’s cultivating quiet composure on a favorite pillow. For others, it’s an invigorating yoga routine. It can be working with affirmations, prayers, relaxation techniques, or mindfulness exercises. However it works for you, you’ll begin the day with a biochemical advantage that will hold stress at bay more effectively.

Play

I know, I know. Morning minutes are precious. You don’t have time for fooling around. If you want to set a relaxed, creative path for the day, however, you’d do well to leave a little extra time for the wholly non-utilitarian. Rough house with the kids, play with your dog, do some doodling, or stop by the park on your morning run and hit the swings.

Read the rest of the article

Recently by Mark Sisson: 9 More Reasons You're Not Losing Weight

In the midst of topical wound ointment, baby wearing, and gynoid fat, sometimes it's nice to just back up and focus on the basics. How much more fundamental does it get really than getting up in the morning? I think we can safely count it as square one. Whether you're stopping by today as a Primal newbie or old timer, most of us need the reminder at some point. Ah, morning. It's an alternately grim and comical scene in most American households. There's the snooze parade, rumpled faces, chronic grouchiness, catatonic showers, coffee frenzy, mad dashes, and neon colored breakfast with cartoon characters (fun prize included!). We're quite a species to behold at 6:30 a.m. What can we do to change this picture? Is there such a thing as a Primal morning short of rising from a sleeping bag in a remote corner of mountain wilderness? You decide. A more approachable goal this morning might be this: what can make the morning feel — and be — a little healthier and happier?

Drink Water

I don't buy the eight glasses a day commandment. I think water is overrated in fact. Nature gave us a sensation called thirst for a reason, and for most of us it tends to work pretty well. That said, after eight hours of total abstinence, your body could use the liquid. I see people down two to three cups of coffee, when they were probably more thirsty than insufficiently caffeinated. Maybe a productive rule would be this: water first, then coffee or tea if you want it.

Wake Up to Natural Light

Once again, reduce your dependence on caffeine by stimulating yourself biochemically with plan old light. Sunlight is ideal, but turn on the all the lamps (full spectrum bulbs are best) if you're up before the sun. Unlike caffeine, there's no impending energy crash waiting for you in a couple hours. If you can, use natural light to wake yourself with open curtains (unless outside artificial light will disturb your sleep at night) or a progressive light u201Calarm.u201D

Spend Fifteen Minutes (or More) Outdoors

Even if it's pitch black when you roll out of bed, try to get some time in before you leave for the day or get sucked into your at-home household/work routine. Enjoy your breakfast outside, shovel the walk now rather than later, throw the ball for your dog, water your garden in your bathrobe (the neighbors can deal with it), or take a walk.

Move

For me, there's just no substitute for a morning walk. It's something I've come to appreciate over the years. Nothing wakes me up, relaxes me, and focuses my thinking in quite the same way. That said, any kind of movement can energize you naturally and boost your circulation. Who doesn't want to begin the day with an endorphin rush? Getting your workout in first thing means you won't be tempted to skip it later when a meeting runs late, you have an event to attend, or you just want to chill out at the end of the day. If you can't bring yourself to workout or walk, do whatever you can: lunges while you brush your teeth, calf raises while you eat your breakfast, stretches while you wait for the shower to warm up. Anything will always be better than nothing.

Meditate

For some, it's cultivating quiet composure on a favorite pillow. For others, it's an invigorating yoga routine. It can be working with affirmations, prayers, relaxation techniques, or mindfulness exercises. However it works for you, you'll begin the day with a biochemical advantage that will hold stress at bay more effectively.

Play

I know, I know. Morning minutes are precious. You don't have time for fooling around. If you want to set a relaxed, creative path for the day, however, you'd do well to leave a little extra time for the wholly non-utilitarian. Rough house with the kids, play with your dog, do some doodling, or stop by the park on your morning run and hit the swings.

Read the rest of the article

Listen to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson

The Best of Mark Sisson

Recently by Mark Sisson: I Knew a Change Had To Be Made

A few years back, I wrote an article explaining 17 possible reasons why you’re not losing weight. It was a troubleshooting guide of sorts, aimed at helping people identify some of things they may be doing (or not doing) that’s causing their stalled fat loss. The etiology of obesity and weight gain is multifactorial, and can be complex. Additionally, we’re all unique human beings. So it can be difficult to pin down one simple cause — or even seventeen simple causes. While unwanted fat loss comes effortlessly to most people that eat according to the Primal eating strategy — as the success stories and hundreds of thousands of positive user experiences indicate — sometimes we inadvertently sabotage our best efforts, stray from best practices, or don’t fully grok what we need to do to become efficient fat-burners. So let’s take a look at nine more possible reasons, shall we?

1. You’re engaging in too much mindless eating.

If you asked most people what made them overweight in the first place, it was that sneaky, tricky combination of eating and, well, doing everything else but focus on the food. It’s eating while watching TV. It’s eating while driving (I’ve seen a man eat a bowl of cereal on the 405). It’s eating while cooking (not tasting to stay abreast of the dish; full-on eating). It’s popcorn at the movies. It’s beer and wings and more beer during the game. In other words, it’s mindless eating. Eating that feels like breathing, like something you just do. You take a few chews, rarely enough to qualify as real mastication, and down the hatch it goes, with a follow-up handful close on its heels. Since increased frequency of eating (i.e. mindless eating or snacking) is strongly associated with the United States’ steadily increasing average energy intake, it’s plausible that mindless eating leads to eating more food.

Be more mindful when you eat; practice mindful eating. Eat food with others, sit down to dinner, take the time to appreciate the food you’re eating. Just because you’re scarfing down grass-fed beef and pastured eggs doesn’t mean you can get away with mindless consumption.

2. You’re eating too many “pleasure foods.”

Paul Jaminet really has a knack for coining phrases, doesn’t he (“safe starch,” anyone?)? A lesser known one is “pleasure foods.” These are things like nuts, dark chocolate, and raw honey — all foods that have gotten the stamp of Primal approval in the past, all foods that are calorically-dense and easy to overeat. This is hard to grasp, because these foods also confer some health benefits. Nuts are rich sources of micronutrients like magnesium, vitamin E, and selenium, and multiple studies suggest that nuts help weight loss. Dark chocolate got an entire post devoted to its impressive polyphenol content (and its fatty acid profile isn’t too bad, either), while honey is quite possibly the best sweetener around. At the very least, it and its bevy of bee-related compounds outperform other sweeteners like maple syrup and plain sugar and result in fewer metabolic issues. All that said, these foods are delicious, packed with calories, and can be overeaten, particularly because they have the reputation as “health foods.”

If you’re not losing weight, moderate your intake of these foods.

3. You’re eating too little.

It’s well-established that prolonged dieting — taking in fewer calories than your body expends — will eventually lead to a downregulation in the basal metabolic rate. This is simple stuff, really. Reducing your food intake will lower your body weight, usually, but it’s not a simple matter of dropping them lower and lower as you lose weight. The body isn’t a passive thing that you’re merely adding to and subtracting from. Instead, it’s a living, breathing, reacting, adapting entity that responds to the lowered caloric input by lowering its energy expenditure. Since you can’t lose weight forever (you’re not just going to waste away into nothingness), perpetually lowering your caloric intake will eventually work against your desire to lose weight.

Instead of sitting at a chronic caloric deficit, consider cycling your caloric intake. Eat less one day, more the next. You might also look into periodic refeeds, which may be able to kickstart a stalled weight loss.

4. You’re under “hidden stress.”

In the previous article, I explained how stress can make us gain weight, or stop losing it. Cortisol — which we release as a part of the stress response — inhibits weight loss, catabolizes muscle, worsens insulin resistance, and promotes the storage of fat. Although back then I was referring to the obvious sources of stress in our lives, like bills, traffic, jobs we hate, bosses we hate, relationship strife, there are other “hidden” types of stressors that result in the very same physiological responses as obvious stressors cause. Foremost among the hidden stressors is the lack of nature exposure. In the literature, researchers often speak of “forest bathing,” or spending a day or two or three in a forest setting to reduce cortisol, enhance immune function, and improve glucose tolerance. I prefer to look at this a different way. Instead of nature exposure being a positive anti-stress agent, urban living is an active stressor. Spending a day in the woods is a return to normalcy rather than an “intervention.”

If you’re not doing this already, take a day or two out of the week to get outside, preferably amongst unkempt, wild nature. It needn’t be a forest or a craggy cliff. The beach, the desert, or even a park will do just fine. In a pinch, you can even listen to nature sounds and look at nature scenes on your computer.

Read the rest of the article

Listen to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson

The Best of Mark Sisson

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

On January 1st of this year my sister challenged the family to a “biggest loser” challenge. I was a little irritated since I felt this was pointed at me. I’m also competitive by nature, and so I decided to accept her challenge.

I weighed 299 lbs when I did the first “weigh in”. I was 35, in size 42 jeans, and had approximately 40% body fat. I hadn’t expressed my frustrations with my weight to anyone, but I knew my family was getting concerned with my health. As a father of two wonderful girls, and husband to a beautiful wife, I knew a change had to be made.

I am also a law enforcement officer, and not being in better shape was a safety concern for me on the job. As an instructor in arrest control techniques and firearms I felt that I was not setting a good example for the other officers. I hated the fact I was becoming the fat doughnut eating cop.

I was eating what I believed was a healthy diet, and I felt I was active. I did not eat out much, and ate home made meals everyday. I grew up with a mother who baked bread everyday, and pastas and even our cereal was homemade. My wife remained in good shape while my weight ballooned over 11 years of marriage.

Last summer I paid a personal trainer, who was a world champion grappler, to help me get in shape. The workouts were very intense, to the point of vomiting after the workout. After months of this I had lost a grand total of 5 lbs, and I eventually gave up the workouts.

One of my co-workers, Greg, a 64 year old man who looks 50 and is ripped, explained the paleo lifestyle to me when I told him about my family’s “Biggest Loser” challenge. I was skeptical since nothing had been working, but obviously it was working for him, so I thought I would give it a try. Greg gave me the Mark’s Daily Apple website and told me about getting cookbooks and other resources.

I explained to my wife the diet and I could not have asked for a more supportive spouse. She changed the way she cooked and shopped for food. We commented on the fact that our cupboards were becoming bare from the lack of processed food, but our fridge was overflowing with meats, vegetables, and other raw foods.

At the end of 6 months the family weighed in to see who had won the challenge. I had dropped from 299 lbs down to 206 lbs, and from 40% body fat to 17%. I not only had won our little family competition, but I was also one of the few that was able to stick to my “diet”. I almost felt guilty with the victory, the weight had come off quickly and easily, I ate when I was hungry, and I ate delicious food.

Read the rest of the article

Recently by Mark Sisson: No Grains Equals No Migraines

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

It's Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark's Daily Apple community please contact me here. I'll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

On January 1st of this year my sister challenged the family to a “biggest loser” challenge. I was a little irritated since I felt this was pointed at me. I’m also competitive by nature, and so I decided to accept her challenge.

I weighed 299 lbs when I did the first “weigh in”. I was 35, in size 42 jeans, and had approximately 40% body fat. I hadn’t expressed my frustrations with my weight to anyone, but I knew my family was getting concerned with my health. As a father of two wonderful girls, and husband to a beautiful wife, I knew a change had to be made.

I am also a law enforcement officer, and not being in better shape was a safety concern for me on the job. As an instructor in arrest control techniques and firearms I felt that I was not setting a good example for the other officers. I hated the fact I was becoming the fat doughnut eating cop.

I was eating what I believed was a healthy diet, and I felt I was active. I did not eat out much, and ate home made meals everyday. I grew up with a mother who baked bread everyday, and pastas and even our cereal was homemade. My wife remained in good shape while my weight ballooned over 11 years of marriage.

Last summer I paid a personal trainer, who was a world champion grappler, to help me get in shape. The workouts were very intense, to the point of vomiting after the workout. After months of this I had lost a grand total of 5 lbs, and I eventually gave up the workouts.

One of my co-workers, Greg, a 64 year old man who looks 50 and is ripped, explained the paleo lifestyle to me when I told him about my family’s “Biggest Loser” challenge. I was skeptical since nothing had been working, but obviously it was working for him, so I thought I would give it a try. Greg gave me the Mark’s Daily Apple website and told me about getting cookbooks and other resources.

I explained to my wife the diet and I could not have asked for a more supportive spouse. She changed the way she cooked and shopped for food. We commented on the fact that our cupboards were becoming bare from the lack of processed food, but our fridge was overflowing with meats, vegetables, and other raw foods.

At the end of 6 months the family weighed in to see who had won the challenge. I had dropped from 299 lbs down to 206 lbs, and from 40% body fat to 17%. I not only had won our little family competition, but I was also one of the few that was able to stick to my “diet”. I almost felt guilty with the victory, the weight had come off quickly and easily, I ate when I was hungry, and I ate delicious food.

Read the rest of the article

Listen to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson

The Best of Mark Sisson

Recently by Mark Sisson: Is It Primal? — Smoked Salmon, Nutritional Yeast, 5-Hour Energy Drinks, and Other Foods Scrutinized

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

The first time it happened I panicked. My vision was slowly filling up with shiny blobs of light. Instinctively I went to a dark room and, 15 minutes in, I couldn’t see. Eventually it ramped down just like it ramped up. And as soon as it cleared, the pain started. I was never one for much pain medication, so I just put a cold rag on my forehead and bore it. Then the nausea kicked in. The pain subsided after a few hours. But it happened again the next week. And the next.

The third time, I hyperventilated from the pain and my boyfriend drove me to the hospital at 2 a.m. A scan cleared me of any brain tumors and I was diagnosed with ocular migraines. The doctor gave me a prescription for a drug used to help cancer patients deal with nausea and told me to get a bottle of Excedrin.

People who have had ocular migraines know what I’m talking about. It fills your world with panic. What will trigger it next? Bright white snow? Car headlights? My mother tells me my aunt gets shots to stop them, so I figure it must run in the family. I became attached to my sunglasses. I’d wear them even at night sometimes to block building or street lights. I had to pull over in my car once because I couldn’t see through the “shinys,” as I called them. It’s not a good way to live. As a college sophomore, I was kept out of class and work with pain. I eventually learned to stop the pain by taking the Excedrin as soon as I saw the flashy lights. But that much medicine would leave me in a haze for the rest of the day.

Here’s what gets me. As a sophomore, I had put on the freshman 15 and wanted to start the year eating healthy. I cut out all white grain products and switched to whole-grain bread and pasta. I ate healthy lean meats but would binge on sugar on the weekends. Years passed and I accepted migraines as a part of my life. I carried a big bottle of meds everywhere. Here’s a look at my old diet:

I graduated college and married the boyfriend who drove me to the hospital. He was always overweight and I, being a journalist/graphic artist, was constantly bombarded with health information and the newest studies. So we tried a few of these popular trends to help him get his weight down (6-foot, 245). I wasn’t as worried about mine at the time (5′ 7", 145), but I figured I could stand to lose a few. We did P90X, the Abs Diet, lots of whole grains and really boring food. I still had migraines. I still had IBS, acne – oh and regular headaches, too!

Read the rest of the article

Listen to Lew’s recent podcast with Mark Sisson

The Best of Mark Sisson

Recently by Mark Sisson: Flab to Fab in 7 Easy Months

It’s about that time for another round of “Is It Primal?” Today we’re covering smoked salmon, a surprisingly stable source of omega-3s. After that, I finally get to nutritional yeast, a food that many of you have been asking about for many moons. I hope you’re happy with the answer. Next up are 5-Hour Energy Drinks, which aren’t quite as bad as you might think. After that, I cover the edibility of brines — olive, pickle, sauerkraut, cocktail onion, and so on. The final object of scrutiny is Kremelta, a kind of coconut oil shortening.

Let’s take a look:

Smoked Salmon

Smoking is one of the world’s oldest food preservation techniques, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: subjecting strips, cuts, and pieces of animal to smoke from wood fires until they are “cooked.” Today, we can preserve our foods by refrigerating, freezing, or applying industrial-scale methods using mass-produced antioxidant compounds, so we tend to eat far fewer smoked meats. Most would agree that this is a good move, as fresh meat tends to be, well, fresher and therefore better for us.

But what about smoked salmon? People love the stuff — I know I do — and it retains an elevated status in modern food culture. It’s become a luxury, a treat, rather than a staple food that we have to eat because it’s all we’ve got and we have no refrigerators. Does smoked salmon hold up to scrutiny? I mean, all that smoke and heat can’t be good for the fragile omega-3s, right?

Actually, salmon does appear to hold up to smoking. Better yet, it gets even more stable. A 2009 study found that smoking salmon at 95 degrees Celsius made the “fragile” fish fats even more oxidatively stable, with a lower peroxide value, fewer TBARS, and fewer free fatty acids, than fresh salmon. That’s right: smoking salmon at a high heat protected the omega-3s from oxidizing to a greater extent than leaving it alone, even if antioxidants were added to the fresh salmon oils. That said, when heating the smoked salmon fat past 75 degrees C, peroxides formed at a faster rate than in the fresh salmon fat.

Oddly enough, cold-smoked salmon (where the fish is smoked without added heat) appears to be more susceptible to oxidation. You’d think the hot-smoking would be more damaging, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

For the double-whammy of salmon preservation techniques, you might want to try fermenting your smoked salmon, as smoked salmon grows even more stable upon fermentation.

Not all smoking is the same. The cheaper outfits use sawdust as the smoking medium — yes, sawdust — while more traditional salmon smokers use actual wood, like hickory, oak, or alderwood. Some Scottish producers even use old Scotch barrels. Since wood (like all plant materials) has bioactive components which manifest in the smoke (smoking, after all, is a traditional method of plant ingestion), the type of wood used probably matters as much as anything.

Verdict: Primal.

Nutritional Yeast

Nutritional yeast is a darling in the vegan set. They’ll sometimes proclaim that since nutritional yeast is a fungus, not an animal, and it contains B12, an animal-free source of vitamin B12 exists. Except it’s not true. Nutritional yeast, an inactive (dead) form of the same yeast that bakers and brewers use, only contains vitamin B12 if its producers decide to add it. So yes, while dotting your bowl of popcorn with the carcasses of a million fallen yeasts is arguably more nutritious than not, it’s not an endogenously-formed, “natural,” cruelty-free source of B12. There remains no naturally-occurring source of B12 that doesn’t involve sweet, sweet animal flesh.

That said, nutritional yeast is certainly interesting. I’ve had it a few times on store-bought kale chips as a sort of cheese replacement. It was tasty. It is a good source of (fortified) vitamins, the utility of which I question beyond the correction of blatant deficiencies.

Nutritional yeast is also a strong source of RNA, specifically the nucleotide uridine. You may not usually consider the ingestion of dietary genetic material, but dietary RNA from yeast can increase uric acid levels in humans. Hyperuricemia, as you probably know, is a strong cause of gout. Of course, that study gave 8 grams of brewer’s yeast nucleotides to the men, a huge amount; most sources suggest that brewer’s yeast (and therefore nutritional yeast, which is the same species) is 3% nucleotides. To get 8 grams of nucleotides, you’d need to eat around 266 grams of nutritional yeast. That’s roughly 33 tablespoons. Good luck with that. Besides, Primal darlings, sardines and organ meats are also high in RNA, so I don’t think we can condemn nutritional yeast on the basis of RNA.

In the amounts the average Primal person who just enjoys the flavor is likely to consume, I don’t think nutritional yeast is a problem.

Verdict: Primal. Just don’t rely on it as a source of vitamins.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: 17 Reasons You're Not LosingWeight

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

P.S. This story was titled by the author of the story, Erin.

Dear Mark,

I am so excited to have a story I feel is worth submitting to the Primal Blueprint Real Life Stories. It’s certainly not anything I imagined at the beginning of this journey.

My story began like so many of the other stories I’ve read on Mark’s Daily Apple. Although I was very skinny in my younger years, sometime around puberty I started to pick up “baby fat” even though I’d had none previously. Through college my weight would fluctuate up and down. One year I’d be a size 6, and the next a 10. My eating habits, like most college students, were awful, but I walked almost everywhere I went, and my job working with children kept me on my feet all day, so I always stayed in an “average” range.

In my early 20s, when I stopped living within a mile radius of everywhere important I had to be and started working a job that involved a lot more sitting, I noticed the weight start to creep on again. However, this time it stayed. I wasn’t happy with this new development, and started to make some changes.

Thus began the vicious cycle of Chronic Cardio and CW diet that would inevitably lead to disappointment and giving up, only to try again 6 months later when my pants didn’t fit. I can remember at one point going to two back to back fitness classes three times a week (one strength and one cardio), and spending 60 grueling minutes on the treadmill or elliptical the other four days. I would go home and eat some low fat, whole grain dinner and count my calories like my life depended on it. However, despite all of this work, I could only take off 5-10 lbs and wasn’t seeing the kind of results that would make my effort feel worth it.

In my mid-20s my doctor did some routine blood work and told me I was hypoglycemic. She recommended I check out an insulin resistance diet and make some changes, since the cycle of hypoglycemia can often lead to diabetes. I started to eat more protein and less carbs (I still held tight to the whole grains, I was a self-proclaimed pasta addict), and did actually lose some weight. But life happened and I quickly fell off the wagon.

Somewhere along the line, I resigned myself to “the way things were” and decided I clearly wasn’t blessed with the genes to obtain the body I wanted. Unfortunately, that resignation, combined with taking on an incredibly stressful and demanding job in the summer of 2011, led to a hefty weight gain.

In the spring of 2012 I attended a dog show (I show Australian Shepherds) and was so excited to have a wonderful weekend full of many wins. Winning dogs means taking win pictures. When I pulled up the website to order my win pictures, though, I was horrified at the me that I saw. I mean, yes I had had to buy a new outfit the week before because my usual skirt and jacket suits didn’t fit anymore, but I wasn’t prepared for the image I saw. It was truly a low point for me to have a visual that, at only 26 years old, I was heavy and out of shape.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: 21 Simple Things To Do To Prepare for a Successful2013

Effective, healthy weight loss isn't only due to the simplistic calories in, calories out paradigm. Nor is it solely reliant on diet and exercise. It's everything — it's all the various signals our body receives from the environment that affect how our genes express themselves and thrive. How we approach the subject matters, too. Our mood, our methods, our temperament. Our conscious decisions and our willpower. It's setting good habits and expunging bad ones. Most of all, it comes down to keeping our genes happy by providing an environment that approximates evolutionary precedent.

1. You think you're eating healthy, but aren't.

Does your diet consist of a massive amount of u201Cproductsu201D? Low-carb or not, you want to eat real food. Flagons of diet soda, plates of pure fiber in the shape of noodles, and loaves of 1g net carb u201Cbreadu201D do not a Primal eating plan make. You're just feeding an addiction and consuming empty calories — sound familiar? Disregard the labels and look inside for what you know to be true: this crap isn't food, and you shouldn't be eating it. It's about way more than just low-carb.

2. You're under too much stress.

The stress response system is subconscious; it responds to stimuli and nothing else. Emotional stress, physical stress, financial stress, relationship stress — I hesitate to even make these distinctions, because the body does not differentiate between sources of stress. They all cause the body to produce cortisol, the fight-or-flight hormone that catabolizes muscle, worsens insulin resistance, and promotes the storage of fat. For 200,000 years, stress meant a life or death situation. It was intense and infrequent, and the cortisol release was arresting and extreme enough to improve the chances of survival. Today, our body responds to a stack of paperwork the same way. Traffic jams are like rival war bands. A nagging boss is like a rampaging mastodon, only on a daily basis. Take a step back from your life and take stock of your stress levels — they may be holding you back.

3. You need to watch your carb intake.

Carbs are key, as always, especially when you've got weight to lose. Veer closer to the bottom of the curve, taking care to avoid all processed food (hidden sugars). You might also try skipping fruit.

4. You're adding muscle.

I always tell people not to get hung up on the scales so much. Those things are useful — don't get me wrong — but they never tell the whole story, like whether or not you're adding lean mass. The PB will spur fat loss, but it also promotes muscle gain and better bone density. If you're feeling good but failing to see any improvements register on the scale's measurements, it's most likely extra muscle and stronger bone from resistance training. You wouldn't know that just from the bathroom scale. If you absolutely need objective records of your progress, get a body fat percentage test (although these might not even tell the whole story) or try measuring your waist.

5. You're not active enough.

Are you Moving Frequently at a Slow Pace for three to five hours every week? Remember: the near-daily low-level (between 55-75% max heart rate) movement should be the bedrock of your fitness regimen. It's easy to do (because every bit of movement counts) and it doesn't dip into your glycogen reserves (making it a pure fat burner, not a sugar burner). If you're on the low end of the spectrum, crank it up toward five weekly hours and beyond.

6. You're lapsing into Chronic Cardio.

Of course, you can go too far with the low-level movement — you can begin to lapse into Chronic Cardio. When you stay above 75% of your maximum heart rate for extended periods of time, you're burning glycogen. Your body in turn craves even more sugar to replenish the lost stores, so you polish off a heap of carbs, preferably simple and fast-acting. You can continue down this route if you wish — I did, for a couple decades — but you'll gain weight, lose muscle, release more cortisol, and compromise any progress you might have made.

7. You still haven't tried IF.

Results vary, but if you've seemingly tried everything else, intermittent fasting can be a great tool to break through a weight loss plateau. Make sure you've fully transitioned onto a Primal eating plan and start small. Skip breakfast and eat a late lunch. If that feels okay, skip breakfast and lunch the next time. Just take it slow and pay attention to your hunger. Eventually, try exercising in a fasted state to maximize the metabolic advantage. If all goes well, your hunger won't necessarily disappear, but it'll change. A successful IF tames hunger, makes it less insistent and demanding.

8. You're eating too much.

Low-carb isn't magic. It reins in wild hunger and tames insulin, but calories do still matter — especially once you approach your ideal weight. In fact, those last few pounds often don't respond to the same stuff that worked so well to get you to this point. Eating nut butter by the spoonful and hunks of cheese without regard for caloric content may have gotten you this far, but you've got to tighten things up if things aren't working. And that's the real test, isn't it? There is a metabolic advantage to eating according to the PB, but if the weight isn't coming off, something's up — and calories may need to come down.

9. You haven't overcome bad habits or developed good ones.

Be brutally honest with yourself. Do you engage in bad habits? If so, identify them. Make tentative, loose plans to disengage from their clutches, and tell people close to you. Make it public, so you can't back out without losing face. You've also got to develop good ones. Follow roughly similar guidelines as when kicking a bad habit — identification, planning, publication — and you'll be on your way.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: A Way of Life Has No Finish Line

Well, the apocalypse never came. No earth-rending seismic activity rearranged geography. Nary a tsunami wrought despair and destruction on coastlines, nor did the turn of the calendar awaken an ancient, many-tentacled evil force hidden deep below. We experienced neither a global awakening of consciousness, a visit from the original extraterrestrial architects of our physiology, nor an explosion of eschatological novelty. What that means is two things: the prophets of 2012 got it wrong, and you have to plan for the rest of your life.

Let’s start with 2013. How are you going to make sure it’s a successful year? What steps will you take?

I’ve got a few suggestions. This may seem a bit untimely coming on the heels of Christmas Day, but I wanted to encourage you to start thinking about where you’ve been and where you’re going. Whenever you have some time off from family and friends, consider getting some thinking done. Consider taking a few preliminary steps toward making 2013 a good year.

1. Install F.lux on your computer.

It takes a minute. It’s free. It will have a measurable impact on the quality and duration of your sleep, which will set the stage for health and productivity. There’s literally no reason not to install F.lux (even if you’re going to be photo-editing or something that requires the full spectrum, you can always turn the program off for a bit).

2. Buy blue-blocking glasses.

F.lux is great, but it only works on select electronic devices. What about everything else, like the TV, that light overhead, or (if you’re willing to look a little strange) the grocery store after dark? Glasses that block blue light will help you to go about your business in this modern life without pushing back your melatonin secretion, allowing you to get to bed at a reasonable time.

3. Find a local grass-fed beef supplier.

Grass-fed beef makes a big difference. It really does. And yes, it’s generally more expensive than grain-fed beef, but if you find the right local supplier and buy directly from them, you can get a better deal.

4. Buy a chest freezer.

If you’re going to switch to grass-fed beef and want the best deal you can find, you’ll want a chest freezer to enable bulk buying (or even cowpooling). You’ll save money and have steady access to good meat, but it’s also fun to weird out visitors with your giant meat locker. Bonus points if you position a sheep’s head such that it’s looking right into the eyes of whoever opens the door.

5. Buy a journal.

A journal gives you access to a free, unlicensed (but effective) therapist, and it allows you to conduct real n=1 experiments to figure out what works for you — and why. If you want to make any changes in the new year, a journal will help you make sense of them.

6. Get a library card.

Part of having a successful year is focusing on the mind — not just the body. I love reading and find books to be a quite powerful influence on the mind. If you think you’re in the same boat, go grab a library card — they’re usually free and woefully underutilized — so that you can start the influencing off right.

7. Find out where and when all the local farmers markets are.

So you’ve long told yourself that you’re going to “start shopping at farmers markets more,” but it never really materializes. That stops in 2013. To help your chances, compile a list of all the local farmers markets. Figure out where they are, when they run, and which ones fit into your schedule. You won’t be able to avoid going if you can’t make up a ridiculous excuse like “I don’t even know when it is!”

8. Treat yourself to a few quality cooking tools.

A good knife, a well-made wooden cutting board, and a solid enameled cast iron pot don’t just make cooking good food easier, they make it more enjoyable. If you want to start cooking more but haven’t been able to really get going, the first step is to get cookware that’s worthy of the food you’ll be making.

9. Find an Asian market near you.

Asian markets are teeming with interesting, delicious, nutritious, unique (at least to many people) foods. Want fresh (often living) fish and shellfish? Check out the seafood section. Want twenty different kinds of leafy greens? Check out the produce section. Want that spice or herb whose health benefits you read about on some blog somewhere? Check out the spice section. Having an Asian market nearby will be a helpful ally in the coming year.

10. Look for a seafood wholesaler.

If you’re lucky enough to have a seafood wholesaler near you, take advantage. You’ll be able to get oysters, crab, fish, and other sorts of sea creatures almost directly after they’re caught/harvested without the few days of lag time that can make a huge difference. Seafood is a big part of a healthy Primal eating plan, so be sure to have a good source.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: 100 Days of Change — MyTransformationStory

I have wanted to write my own success story of my life on the Primal Blueprint diet ever since I reaped the initial benefits only three days into the commitment, but I was waiting until I had “finished” my goals. It’s now been more than nine months since my adventure into the Primal lifestyle began, and I have begun to realize that there really is no finish line in personal wellness and contentment. This has become a way of life, and one can always improve oneself. Mark said it best about the Primal Blueprint diet: “This is not the most ripped contest.”

From the age of 6, I was a very active child and an especially athletic one. I joined my first competitive swim team that year and it became the focus of my life for the next 12 years. Swimming for five to ten times a week in competitive training kept me extremely fit and health never crossed my mind as I had not an ounce of visible fat anywhere on my body. Keep in mind, though, I was never very cut or ripped either.

I grew up in the south, and my diet reflected the region: lots of meat, chicken fried steak, lots of potatoes and corn, etc. I had sit down family meals with freshly cooked dinners most nights, so in my opinion everything at my dinner table could be considered “healthy,” because hey, at least I wasn’t eating fast food, right? I ate a lot at meals, with heaping amounts of white gravy poured over meat and potatoes, to the point that I had to lay down after each meal.

By the time I was in 7th grade, I had picked up long distance running and joined the cross-country team, in addition to being on the swim team. A normal day for me consisted of 1.5 hour swim practice before school, 5-7 mile run after school, then a 2 hour swim practice after that. Like Michael Phelps, I had to consume massive amounts of calories in order to even maintain my small weight of 145 lbs. (I am 5’10”.) My mom was unable to cook enough to meet my caloric needs, so I turned to eating quick frozen foods between meals. I could easily eat four Hot Pockets at a time, more than once a day in addition to my regular meals. Things started to change for me when we moved.

In 9th grade we moved to Michigan, where I continued my athletic and eating frenzy. Now, I don’t want to say that Michiganders are more unhealthy than southerners, as I have no proof of this, but the city suburban life coaxed me into eating more and more fast food and frozen/boxed meals at this age. This is where my problems began. By 16, I started to have excruciating bouts of heartburn after every meal. It was so terrible that I would have to lie on my side for half an hour after each meal with my eyes closed (a nurse told me this helps put the esophagus in a neutral position). This continued untreated for several years, until I was about to graduate high school. By the time I graduated, I had horrible stomach pains, diarrhea and indigestion, in addition to the heartburn after every meal, every day.

After weeks of tests, I found out that I had inexplicably become lactose intolerant, literally overnight; in addition I had two of the three markers for celiac disease. The doctor said it was not enough to be conclusive, and that I likely didn’t have gluten intolerance. So I was sent on my way with a high-powered medicine for my heartburn and a new ban on dairy products. What happens when you tell an 18-year-old that they have no problem with gluten and that they can take a pill for the pain instead of changing food choices? They start eating worse!

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Recently by Mark Sisson: 10 Last-Minute Primal Gift Ideas

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

Note: Andrew experiments with Intermittent Fasting. While IFing is an effective tool for many people, it is not a required component of the Primal Blueprint. As Andrew says, YMMV (your mileage may vary).

I’m nearly 56 years old and about four years from retirement. I have been training for retirement by building skills and habits for things I want to do when I retire, and at the same time I’m training for my eighties. Health care is on a path to crisis for people my age, and I figure the only way to survive the health-care crisis is to not need it. I came up with the 100-days idea because I figure it takes about three months to make a real change in oneself, and I had several real changes I needed to make. I choose to think in days, because change-making is a daily commitment.

My first 100-day objective was simply to get more active and build strength. I was 230 pounds, it was late July 2011, and I began a weight-lifting/cardio routine coupled with low-carb/Primal Blueprint diet. After 100 days I was much healthier and 220 pounds. I wasn’t strict enough with the calorie restriction, so despite eating more Primally I didn’t lose all that much weight. I did lose fat, but gained muscle.

The second 100 days began in November 2011, and my objective was to become a better Nordic skier. I skied 108 days between mid-November and the end of March. I went from being a floundering spastic to being able to ski with most of the better skiers in my age range, but I never had their speed or endurance uphill. My weight didn’t change much, but again I had not embraced the caloric restriction idea. Low-carb is important, but I think that at some point you have to eat less if you’re going to lose weight.

The third 100-day objective was to get myself to a healthy weight and be prepared for intense XC ski training at the beginning of the next ski season. At that time I wanted to be firmly under 200 pounds. I set my sights on losing another 25 pounds and starting trail running and mountain biking to help with my conditioning.

Running has never been my thing because of lower back trouble. Running made it so painful I figured I just wouldn’t be able to do it. I was wrong about that of course (more on the back pain later). Trail running turns out to be a lot easier on my back than road or treadmill running.

I began alternate-day eating in April this year at 220 pounds. I took a real interest in Nordic skiing (both classic and skate) last winter and I happen to live near an excellent Nordic ski facility, which transforms into an amazing XC running and single-track biking facility when the snow leaves. This is my playground.

My program for the summer was to eat only within a 4-hour window every second day, and run or ride 4 to 10 km 4 or 5 times per week. For 10 weeks I followed the ADE program without faltering and then began to relax a little, going to one meal a day for a week, then back to alternate days for a while. I was still eating a lot less, but as I approach a healthy weight it becomes less important, and sometimes it seems to work better eating a smaller amount once every day.

I took the word fasting out of the alternate-day program because I think fasting is more than skipping a meal, or even several meals. Not being a scientist or nutritionist, all I have is my own body for a lab and my own experimentation for evidence. Some things I have proven sufficiently to guide me, other stuff I’m still testing. As such, you should consider this anecdotal and your mileage may vary!

I believe there are three phases of hunger as follows:

1. Psychological demand to eat. You can ignore this. All you’re doing is messing with your mind.
2. Physiological demand to eat. You can ignore this too. Now you’re messing with your digestive system and it tells you about it.
3. Physiological need to eat. Don’t panic, but pay attention. This is the zone where real changes take place in your body. This is what I consider fasting to be.

Physiological need is quite a different matter from the demand phases. It kicks in late on day 3 or maybe day 4 of a fast. In my opinion, before that time all you did was skip a meal or two or three. I’m not suggesting that phases 1 and 2 are easy; in fact they are the most difficult.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: Primal Blueprint Shopping List

I do a gift list every year on Mark’s Daily Apple, and each time I try to put a fresh spin on it. Last year, each of the 10 Primal Blueprint Laws got a corresponding gift. Two years back, I separated the gifts into stocking stuffers and bigger ticket items. This year, since it’s getting to be that time, and lots of you have waited til the last minute, I’ve put together a list of last-minute gift ideas. These are items that, if ordered by today, should arrive (at least in the continental US) by the 24th of December. Unlike most last-minute gifts, these are actually legitimately good and useful items that any Primal (or otherwise health conscious) person would be happy to receive. And you don’t have to wade through the frightening morass of desperate humanity that frequents brick-and-mortar stores in the days leading up to the holidays.

Oh, and just because these are presumed to be gift ideas for other people, don’t think you can’t treat yourself to a gift or two. First up, I’ve got a special Primal Fuel holiday announcement to make…

Primal Fuel

Back when I first released Primal Fuel, I pledged to lower the price when and where I could (without cutting any corners on quality) through volume sales and larger ingredient buys. With the fabulous testimonials and a significant number of you on autoship, I’m pleased to announce that I’m now able to reduce the price by a further $10. Hopefully, with this price reduction, the number of MDA readers who already enjoy and rely on Primal Fuel will grow even larger. After all, the Primal Blueprint is not about recreation or reenactment of ancient life. Grok isn’t the final word; he’s just the starting point. Ultimately, the Primal Blueprint is about taking cues from evolutionary biology and modern clinical research to arrive at the best place possible. And Primal Fuel is simply a delicious, convenient way to obtain healthy coconut fat and gold standard whey protein without going overboard on the carbohydrates.

In addition to the price reduction, I’ve also put together a special limited-time offer. Through the end of the year, going on automatic delivery (which you can cancel at anytime) for Primal Fuel will get you a free copy of The Primal Blueprint 90-Day Journal AND a free copy of The Primal Blueprint 21-Day Total Body Transformation. And you’ll receive the Primal Fuel Blender Bottle for free as well. This is the perfect way to help you or a lucky gift recipient get a jump start on 2013 health and fitness goals. Just add the Primal Fuel to your shopping cart through this link and both books will automatically be added to your order at no additional cost. (For new Primal Fuel automatic delivery orders only.)

Note: If you are already on automatic delivery for Primal Fuel your future shipments will be dropped to the new $69 price. Happy holidays!

Omni Red Palm Oil

In spite of its rich full-spectrum vitamin E (tocopherols and tocotrienols) and CoQ10 contents, red palm oil gets a bad rap sometimes. It has a funny taste that’s difficult to hide, so it has to be a feature of whatever dish you’re making. Plus, the most common source of palm oil — Southeast Asia — is plagued with sustainability issues. Natural forests are destroyed to make way for the palm plantations, and those forests are home to some of the most intelligent, sensitive, awesome great apes on the planet: orangutans. More than the other apes, I’ve always been partial to orangutans. They seem like wise men of the forest, solitary saintly hirsute figures that regard you from their tree-top nests and make you reevaluate your own life. They’re also being killed in droves because of palm oil, which has turned a lot of people off from a particularly nutritious source of fat. Luckily, Omni palm oil comes from Ghana, a nation without orangutans and without palm oil sustainability issues.

iPad Blue Blocking Filter

Imagine if you were transported back to the upper Paleolithic with an iPad in tow (this is not a Terminator-style time machine, so you can keep your clothes and belongings). Assuming you could still get service from the future, you’d be like a god. You could predict lunar and solar events, post to Primal message boards about what paleo man really ate, show them funny cat videos, and take sweet photos of real life Groks in hunting poses using hip Instagram filters. You’d be like the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, only more so. Of course, you’d probably also disrupt the heck out of their sleep. You’d all be crowded around the blue glow of the screen as the campfire flames died out, ignored and forgotten. Melatonin production would halt, and you’d have created an entire tribe of groggy-morninged night owls with severe insulin resistance. My point? Technology is great, but it comes with a price. If someone who’s got you scouring your mind looking for the perfect gift insists on using their iPad before bed, the least you can do is buy them a filter that blocks the hormone-disrupting blue light.

Nature’s Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants

Forget organic versus conventional: for sheer nutritional content, nothing beats wild plants. Being able to go on a hike and spot all the edible plants, herbs, and other things that grow is empowering. I can’t do it, mind you, but it’s got to be a helpful skill to have. It’s also nice not to have to kowtow to the whims of those overbearing, fascistic farmers market vendors (kidding) and instead be able to go “shopping” for the freshest greens money can’t buy whenever you want. This particular guide — Nature’s Garden – to wild edible plants comes highly recommended, so give it to someone who you think will really utilize its knowledge.

ProSource Exercise Fitness Gymnastic Rings

Put aside, for a moment, the awkward product name that looks like it was spawned in an SEO guy’s nether regions (“I know, let’s call ‘em Exercise Fitness Rings!”), and consider that gymnastic rings are perhaps the best all purpose upper body strengthening tool around. If you don’t believe me, find a set and try to do a few dips. Simply holding yourself up at the top of the dip position is surprisingly tough for beginners. You’ll shake and tremble and quake up there, suddenly forced to reckon with your own body weight and a floppy, ever-moving base of “support.” That’s the thing about rings: you have to create the base of support. It’s not attached to the ground. It’s not made of steel. It’s suspended from two dangly cords that simply will not stop moving around and taking advantage of every tiny shift of imbalance you provide. Plus, you can take these portable rings everywhere you go for a fantastic workout.

The Primal Blueprint Chef Kit

I may be biased, but this is an objectively great deal. You get all three Primal Blueprint cookbooks PLUS a Primal Blueprint Apron, a newly-designed Primal Blueprint Poster, and a Primal Blueprint Shopping List and Pen, all for less than the cost of the three cookbooks. This is perfect for anyone who’s ever asked, “How can you eat this way? What do you even eat?” Three books of full-color photos and descriptive recipes will provide a quick and timely answer.

Feel free to keep the freebies and distribute the cookbooks as you see fit.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: Dear Mark: Food Fatigue Edition

So you’ve read the book and you’re ready to go Primal. You’ve purged your pantry and fridge of every last SAD (Standard American Diet) “food” item and you plan on hitting up your local farmers’ market or grocery store to stock up on delicious and nutritious Primal fare. But where do you start? I’ve created this page to take the guesswork out of shopping for Primal foods. Listed below you’ll find a fairly comprehensive list of what to eat on the Primal Blueprint eating plan (if you think something is missing from the list feel free to shoot me a line), aka The Healthiest Foods in the World. No 10 servings of daily grains around here. Just meat, vegetables, eggs, healthy fats, nuts/seeds and fruit.

Links below will take you to one of my Smart Fuel posts where you can learn more about the food, and, in some cases, to recipes featuring the ingredient. As I write about these ingredients in future blog posts this page will be updated with new links, so check back often!

You can also download this Primal Blueprint Shopping List (PDF). Print out a copy, hit your local grocer and start getting Primal today!

Vegetables Artichoke Cucumbers Parsnips Arugula Eggplant Peppers (all kinds) Asparagus Endive Pumpkin Avocados Fennel Purslane Beets/Beet Greens Fiddlehead Ferns Radishes Bell Peppers Garlic Romaine Lettuce Bok Choy Green Beans Rutabaga Broccoli Jerusalem Artichokes Sea Vegetables Broccoli Rabe Jicama Spinach Brussels Sprouts Kale Squash Cabbage Kohlrabi Swiss Chard Carrots Leeks Tomatoes Cauliflower Mushrooms Turnip Greens Celery Mustard Greens Watercress Celery Root Olives Collards Onions   In Moderation Cassava Sweet Potatoes Yams Potatoes Wild Rice Taro   Fish Anchovies Mahi Mahi Salmon Bass Monkfish Sardines Cod Mullet Tilapia Eel Northern Pike Tuna Haddock Orange Roughy Walleye Halibut Perch Any Other Wild Fish Herring Red Snapper Mackerel Rockfish   Shellfish Abalone Lobster Scallops Clams Mussels Shrimp Crab Oysters Crayfish Prawns   Meat and Poultry Beef Goat Pork Chicken Lamb   Game Meat Alligator Emu Rabbit Bear Goose Snakes Buffalo Pheasant Turkey Caribou Kangaroo Venison Duck Ostrich Elk Quail   Organ Meats Hearts Liver Sweetbreads Kidney Bone Marrow Tongue   Eggs Chicken Goose Roe/Caviar Duck Pheasant Other Bird Eggs Emu Quail   Nuts and Seeds Almonds Pecans Sunflower Seeds Brazil Nuts Pine Nuts Walnuts Hazelnuts Pistachios Derivative Butters Hempseeds Pumpkin seeds Macadamias Sesame Seeds   Healthy Fats/Oils Avocado Oil Macadamia Oil Unprocessed Palm Oil Butter/Ghee Olive Oil Walnut Oil Coconut Oil/Milk Sesame Oil Lard Tallow   Fruit Preferred Blackberries Boysenberries Gooseberries Blueberries Cranberries Raspberries   Other Fruits Apple Honeydew Melon Pears Apricot Kiwi Persimmon Banana Lemon Plums Cantalope Lime Pomegranate Cherries Lychee Rhubarb Coconut Mango Star Fruit Figs Nectarine Strawberries Goji Berries Orange Tangerine Grapefruit Papaya Watermelon Grapes Passion Fruit All other fruits Guava Peaches   Spices and Herbs Anise Cumin Peppermint Basil Dill Rosemary Black Pepper Fennel Sage Cayenne Pepper Ginger Stevia Chili Pepper Mint Tarragon Cilantro Mustard Seeds Thyme Coriander Seeds Nutmeg Turmeric Cinnamon Oregano Cloves Paprika

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Recently by Mark Sisson: 7 Foods You Don't Need To BuyOrganic

First of all, I think we can all agree that Primal food is a solid foundation of taste, nutrition, satiety, density, and volume. When you put a piece of well-cooked grass-fed steak, free of sugary salty soybean oil-infused sauces and unnecessary breading in your mouth, you appreciate that this is how meat was meant to be. When you use fresh vegetables, kale that bites back and asparagus that snaps in your mouth and cooked carrots that manage to be both tender and crispy at once, you know the goodness of produce. And these fill you up, they nourish, they enrich your life. Still, though, we humans possess the ability to perceive and appreciate a nearly infinite range of flavors and textures. Hundreds (if not thousands) of cuisines and flavors beckon, and we should probably entertain their advances. If we don’t, if we eat the same things all the time, we may run into food fatigue.

I’m probably a bad example of this, because I’m the type of guy who’d be pretty happy with just ten or so foods for the rest of my life. Still, even I like to change things up now and again. And it seems I’m not alone. This edition of Dear Mark is geared directly to you. Let’s go:

I’ve been eating eggs for breakfast everyday for years now. Now don’t get me wrong, I still love eggs, but sometimes I either don’t have time to cook eggs before leaving for work or eggs just don’t sound good. A little breakfast variety would be nice. Eggs seem like the perfect morning food (protein, fat, nutrients) but there’s only so many fried eggs I can eat. Any ideas?

Thanks, Mark, Paul

Eggs truly are the perfect breakfast item. They feature high quality protein, animal fat, and, particularly if you have access to real pastured eggs, a micronutrient profile that puts nearly every other food to shame. Plus, eggs also provide a nice dose of cholesterol and choline, two brain-boosting nutrients that you’ll likely put to good use. Oh, sure, you could make the argument for liver or oysters as being more “nutrient-dense,” but who wants to cook up a batch of beef liver every morning? Eggs are simple and easy.

But they’re also boring, or so some people believe. Eggs are just eggs. You can scramble them, boil them, make omelets, or fry them, and not much else.

Yeah, eggs have become the quintessential breakfast food, which wouldn’t be a problem if we hadn’t backed ourselves into a corner with our preconceived notions of what constitutes breakfast. We need to expand our breakfast horizons. Breakfast needn’t be dominated by over-easy or scrambled eggs seasoned solely with salt and pepper and cooked in butter. I love eggs like that — don’t get me wrong — but some people need variety.

I would be loathe to suggest shifting your focus away from eggs for the aforementioned reasons. Instead, come up with some new variations of old favorites:

Hard-boiled eggs are handy and hardy, but the yolks can get a little chalky if you let them cook for even a half minute too long. If you’re rushing about trying to get ready for the day, you’re bound to make a mistake and overcook the eggs. The solution here, of course, is not to take up bagel eating or force IF into your life. It’s to try a soft-boiled egg. With a soft-boiled egg, the yolk stays creamy, velvety, runny and the white gets custardy. I cover cold eggs with an inch of water in a pot then bring to a rolling boil over high heat. Upon boiling, shut off the heat and cover the pot. After four minutes (three minutes if you’re starting with room temperature eggs), dump the water. I prefer peeling the eggs under cool running water while they’re still warm, but others say to plunge them in an ice bath. If you’re strapped for time, the cool water is good enough. Lately, I’ve been dusting the eggs with black pepper (lots), sea salt, and turmeric. Far superior to dry hard-boiled eggs (with less oxidation of the cholesterol to boot) and hard to mess up since, if you mess up and go over the time, you end up with pretty good hard-boiled eggs.

Other ideas?

• Scrambled eggs with salt, pepper, butter, and maybe even a bit of bacon is a true classic, yes. I’ll never turn down a plate. That said, you can easily transform a humdrum plate of scrambled eggs with the addition of a couple generous tablespoons of tomato paste about midway through the scrambling process.
• Turn a plate of sunny side up pastured eggs into a sweet and savory treat with a dusting of cinnamon and some coconut oil.
• Or how about frittatas? Have your ingredients prepped the night before, then, when you wake up, scramble the eggs, mix it all together, and dump them in the oven before you start getting ready. By the time you’re dressed/caffeinated/presentable/etc., your egg-based breakfast will be ready.
• One of my favorites on a cold (for Malibu) winter morning is a couple cups of bone broth with two or three raw eggs dropped in and allowed to cook. The white will cook fast, since it disperses through the liquid, while the yolk will remain gooey unless pricked and allowed to run. Include a handful of bitter greens and you’ve got a quick, easy breakfast on your hands.

These variations are small and often require no additional prep time, but they really and truly pay off. The resulting dishes taste better, taste different, and are arguably more nutritious than their predecessors. You maintain the ease and nutrition of an egg breakfast without succumbing to monotony. Win win.

Also, don’t limit yourself to the things I suggested. Look around for more suggestions from similar eaters. The point is that eggs are culinary blank slates that happen to be delicious on their own. Feel free to toss in some berries, bacon, sausage, sweet potato, grilled onions, or whatever else strikes your fancy, because everything goes with eggs. I’m serious — name something and I bet it goes with eggs.

The strangest thing has happened to me recently. I am a huge proponent for the Primal lifestyle and eating strategy, but I’ve recently lost my craving for meat. I’m not completely disgusted by it, but I’ve lost my drive to eat it. What should I do? Listen to my body and not eat it, or try something else?

Thanks Jenny

First of all, I don’t think you should give up “meat.” It’s an essential part of the human diet, it’s full of highly bioavailable micronutrients, and, well, it’s just really, really good for you. However, I do think we tend to run the risk of forgetting that an animal is so much more than “meat.” A pig is not just belly and loin. A cow is not just ribeye and burger. A chicken is not just breast and wing. There are so many incredibly diverse, delicious, and nutritious parts to an animal that we do ourselves a disservice by sticking to just “meat” — and we can easily find ourselves stuck in a food rut as a result.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: I Have Never Felt Better in My Life

A couple weeks ago, I gave you a list of the top 10 foods you should strive to buy organic. Some of you found the list useful, while others felt a bit overwhelmed and disheartened by the information, saying that it felt like they couldn’t eat anything that wasn’t organic. Today, I’ll try to make things a little better by giving you a list of the foods which are perfectly fine in their conventional form. However, even if the following conventional foods are relatively safe for your health, some would argue that you should still buy organic in order to support the workers and protect the environments exposed to agricultural chemicals. That’s totally valid, and it’s part of the reason why I try to buy organic, but it’s not what I’m discussing here. It’s a topic for another time. Today is about maximizing the health of you and your family while cutting costs when and where you can.

So, what common, Primal staples can you buy conventional?

Coconut

You won’t see coconut on any Clean 15 or Dirty Dozen lists anytime soon, because the general public has yet to catch on to its fatty, nutty delights. That said, we Primal people eat coconut. We saut with coconut oil and slather it onto vegetables, sweet potatoes, hair, skin, and armpits. We drink and make curries with coconut milk and cream. We obsess over coconut butter, paying tribute to its glory with a greasy spoon. And when we’ve been running or training particularly hard — or it’s hot out — we often reach for the coconut water. We like our coconut, so it’s in our best interest to determine whether we should be buying organic or not.

Luckily for us, it doesn’t look like organic coconut makes a big difference. Several studies have looked for pesticide residues in coconut products and come up virtually empty handed. There’s this 2008 study, which was unable to detect any pesticide residues in crude coconut oil. Poly-aromatic hydrocarbons, which are generated during the coconut flesh quick drying process and are carcinogenic, were detected in crude coconut oil but were removed in the refining process. Virgin unrefined coconut oil, then, may still contain these hydrocarbons, unless it’s wet-milled and processed without quick-drying the flesh. That goes for both organic and conventional coconut oil, to be clear.

In another study, researchers examined 15 samples of coconut water using two different methods of pesticide detection and were unable to detect any of the 11 pesticides they were looking for.

Coconut milk is also going to be as free from pesticides as any other coconut product. Since it’s made from fresh flesh, not the dried, heat-treated stuff, coconut milk should also be free of poly-aromatic hydrocarbons.

Onions

Onions don’t just make you cry for cutting them, they make pests weep at the thought of eating them. Onions are naturally resistant to pests, which is probably why just 0.3% of onions tested for chemical residue came up positive. Big Agra may cut corners and prioritize profit over quality or consumer health, but that just means they won’t fork out the money for chemicals if they don’t have to; they’re not comic book villains, dumping drums of noxious endocrine disruptors and carcinogens onto their crops to punish us. Not onion farmers, at least.

So, feel free to go wild with conventional onions, because there is very little, if any, advantage to organic onions from a health perspective. Unlike many other fruits and vegetables, conventionally grown onions have the same level of polyphenols as organically grown onions.

Avocado

Avocados are another safe food that ends up with some of the lowest pesticide residues around. Maybe it’s the scaly skin and the way they just kinda “lurk” there up in tree tricking pests into thinking they’re up against alligators. Maybe it’s the fact that a bug got burned one too many times with a beautiful looking avocado that turned out to be stringy and brown on the inside. Maybe pests just hate waiting for an avocado to ripen (who doesn’t?) and give up. Actually, even though a somewhat significant amount of chemicals can be used on avocado orchards, they just don’t make it into the fatty, delicious flesh we crave and consume.

Avocado farmers, both organic and conventional, do use extensive amounts of copper as a fungicide. Copper is an essential nutrient, but too much can be harmful. A single Florida avocado contains 0.9 mg, which is about 100% of the RDI, so don’t go around eating several a day.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: I Didn't Know How Bad I Felt Before, Until I Started Feeling SoGood!

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

The beginning of my success story starts out as most might, with very unhealthy eating habits. I can remember as a kid in 4th or 5th grade making my own version of a milkshake which consisted of a whole row of Oreos that was mixed up with milk until it was a consistency that was near impossible to drink. Around that same time I also became addicted to Pepsi cola. It seemed like I had 2-3 cans a day and this continued throughout high school. I was a somewhat active kid and I did not seem to ever put on weight.

After high school I attended an art college where food took a back seat to my artwork. When I would eat, it was the typical college food, e.g. cafeteria pizza, breakfast bars, steak-ums and a lot of frozen microwavable meals (especially taquitos), while changing my consumption of cola to 4-6 Dr. Peppers a day. On the outside I seemed to be very healthy, but inside I was doing great harm to my body daily. I weighed about 130 pounds at 5’7” with barely any muscle at all.

Shortly before I graduated college I was physically assaulted. I had one side of my face crushed so badly that the bone fragments became so small I ended up having to have two six and a half hour surgeries where titanium plates were implanted and a bone grafting had to be done. To say that I was depressed is a gross understatement. My time after that was invested in personal creative projects. I shut myself off from the outside world and with the exception of the artist in me I really didn’t care about myself. I could feel myself declining into a sad state mentally, physically, and emotionally. Around this time I also noticed a gut forming.

About a year and a half after I graduated college, I landed a salary job which included a yearly travel season. Between my newfound income and not having a kitchen on the road, I was eating at restaurants and fast food joints daily. My favorite go-to food at bars were deep-fried breaded appetizers. I kind of knew these were not the healthiest decisions, so when I would buy groceries I tried to counterbalance it by buying anything that said reduced fat or fat free. Little did I know back then that saturated fat should have been my friend and that sugar and carbs should have been avoided. I assumed that fat made you fat and sugar and carbs just gave you energy. So I kept eating tons of snack food while at home and continued drinking 2-3 cans of Dr. Pepper daily. Over a five year period my weight shot up from around 135 to over 180 pounds.

Now, at a weight of over 180 pounds I put a lot of effort into pretending that I was happy. I have always been a comedian, if you will, always joking around, but I wasn’t kidding myself, I was miserable inside. I would wake up in the morning having to pop my back into place because, while sleeping on my side, my gut would twist my back out of whack. Almost daily I would throw up stomach acid, which, let me tell you, was not a great way to start the day. Headaches were a daily occurrence and I was always tired after lunch. As an artist, I did not just work from 9 to 5. I continued working on art and other projects well into the night wearing myself thin and getting stressed out way too easily.

In 2010, I can remember having a typical busy day and stopping by the grocery store after work. I decided to take my blood pressure in one of those machines by the pharmacy. I ended up doing it three different times because after I saw the first result I knew it had to have been wrong. It wasn’t. I was borderline stage three hypertension. During my next doctor appointment I was told that I had to take blood pressure medication and that for my height I was technically obese. I remember thinking to myself that the guidelines were a joke. What if it was all muscle? Would I still be obese? I was in denial.

When I turned 30 in March of 2011, I started to question my health and purchased my first scale. I had taught myself how to make sushi rolls at that time and thought it would be a great way to lose weight and “get healthy”. I actually made a sushi rolling station in my living room and ate tons of the stuff. This approach definitely did not work. My next approach was to purchase a little blender and make fruit smoothies. I was successful with making something that tasted extremely good but there was so much sugar in the drinks that my weight did not budge; it may have even gone up. Was I doomed? Was I always going to be unhealthy?

My next doctor appointment was in May of 2011. My blood pressure with medication was still in stage 2 hypertension and I was still right at the obese mark. I remember thinking that I really needed to change my life around and not knowing how to do it. I couldn’t settle with failure.

I had been reading a blog almost daily that posted an array of different authors from different websites with the common theme of personal liberty, economics, health and wellness, among other subjects. When I read the articles from what I now know was a godsend of a website MarksDailyApple.com showing success stories of how people were able to lose weight and become healthier by eating bacon, I knew it was too good to be true (just like all of the gold that was waiting for me to pick up in a Nigerian bank account). Around August of that year I noticed a friend of mine losing weight who told me it was easy. He was following what Mark’s Daily Apple talked about daily. I said I would give it a try. I knew it was going to be a challenge since I was going into my travel season and so much of the food I ate was on the list of what not to eat.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: Top 9 Most Important Foods To BuyOrganic

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

Dear Mark,

I am writing to add myself to your list of PB success stories. The pictures I’ve attached above pretty much tell it. The first three were from the last few years, and they show me at my heaviest. The one in the pink gown was taken at about three months into the PB plan, and the last one, of me with the kettlebells, was taken a few days ago, at 7 months into the plan. I am holding 40 pounds worth of kettlebells and that’s how much weight I’ve lost since February of this year, with your help.

I am currently 54 years old, have struggled with weight gain and loss for the last 35 years. The yo-yo started going up and down in college, and I would gain and lose over and over. I have tried every fad diet there is, including starvation, and have done Weight Watchers three times. I was active over the years, but my food intake was typical of the standard American diet you refer to all the time. SAD indeed. I was lazy when it came to food preparation and I ate a lot of cereal, bread products, and protein, power, or granola bars. I would never have thought I could go without it like I do now. Cereal and toast or an English muffin was a favorite breakfast, and dinner of mine. I drank a lot of coke over the years.

I gained more recent weight after I had a hysterectomy in 2005. My hormones got messed up. I had a few job changes, life stressors in excess (sick parents, a son in college, financial issues), and a terrible, wheat, other grains, and sugar filled diet. If I managed to lose some, I would gain it back, plus more. I worked out with a personal trainer for close to a year in 2010. I managed to lose about 18 pounds by counting calories, carbs, protein, and doing excessive cardio, and a very strict lifting schedule. The minute I lost focus, back it came.

I had a physical exam summer of 2011 and I was unhappy with my weight (high 170s) and lab results. My cholesterol and triglycerides were high, and my HgA1C was borderline for Type 2 diabetes. I had asked my doctor to run one, because I wanted to see what my numbers were. As a nurse, I was seeing a huge increase in the number of diabetic patients and it worried me. I felt like I was headed to being a Type 2 diabetic if I didn’t change things. I didn’t feel good, I felt sluggish, and was really self conscious about how I looked.

I moved to Tennessee in August of 2011, (knowing no one, to start a new job) and joined a gym for something to do. I dabbled around at it, then the holidays started and I got heavier, and hit 183, my highest ever. I made a New Year’s resolution to lose weight, yet again. In January 2012, I got a free session with a trainer, who was sympathetic to my tale of woe. She listened to my frustrations, and then she told me she had something for me that she thought would really appeal to me. Her words were, “as a nurse (I’m a registered nurse for 34 years) you will like the science behind this plan.” She wrote your website down for me, and I was interested enough to look at it.

I studied your website for about three weeks. I read every article, every link, several success stories. I signed up for your emails, and started having many “aha” moments. I ordered the 21-Day Total Body Transformation, read it, and committed to trying it. I endured “low carb flu” and detoxed off sugar and learned how to shop differently. I started taking my lunches to work, and got a lot of questions about what many perceive as an odd eating style. Weight did not come off fast at first. I almost gave it up, about four weeks into it, because I was not seeing results like I wanted to see. I remember reading in your books, though, to stick with it and be patient and that eventually, without the constant influx of carbs my body was used to, it would HAVE to start burning my stored fat. At last, slowly but surely, pounds started dropping off.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: Hangover Hacks You Can Hang Your HatOn

In a perfect world, we’d all be shopping at farmers markets for our produce, tending to bug-eating, orange yolk-producing chickens in our backyards, pooling our resources with other folks to divvy up grass-fed and/or pastured animals, having the farmers who produce our food over for dinner, milking the A2-casein grass-fed teats with our bare hands into BPA-free containers, culling the geese down at the local pond and roasting the dead, foraging for seagull eggs, going mushroom hunting in the forest, ensnaring chubby winter squirrels fattened on acorns and small birds, raising kale-fed crickets for alternative protein sources, and, well, you get the idea. But that isn’t realistic for most people. And heck, who would want to go to all the trouble. What with how easy it is to just swing by the grocery store on the way home from work, especially with a filthy kid in the backseat who’s just out of soccer practice (on a muddy field, no less) and starving.

However, we still want to make the right choices. We want to buy the organic foods that provide the most bang for their buck, that make the most sense. You’ve probably heard of the Dirty Dozen — that annually-updated list of the twelve fruits and vegetables that contain the highest levels of pesticide residues. Let’s go beyond that, though, because unless you’re a vegan or a fruitarian who lives on produce alone, you’ll want to hear about other foods too. Particularly animal products, which you’re probably eating on a fairly regular basis.

The following list assumes you’re hitting up the regular, everyday grocery store — your Safeways, your Krogers, your Aldis — for most of your food. It’s roughly ordered from most important to least, though after baby food, dairy, and beef, the lines blur. I’d be hard pressed to choose between eggs and leafy greens, particularly given the amount of greens I eat. Luckily, this is just a thought exercise rather than a real dilemma for most. So let’s get to it. If there was one food item that I’d recommend you paying extra for, it would be…

1. Baby foods.

The human infant is a helpless sack of flesh and poop and pee. They’re cute and lovable, sure, but they can’t be relied upon to make good food choices. And because of their ridiculously long development time, babies are far more susceptible to pesticides, especially the endocrine disruptors. An adult can probably get away with a little xenoestrogenic activity from consumed pesticides, since the systems are all but established, but a young baby who’s still developing those systems? Pesticides can disrupt both fetal and childhood development. If your kid has moved on to baby food, make sure it’s organic — whether you make it from scratch or buy it at the store. That goes for the “traditional” pureed goop people give their kids, as well as the foods Primal parents are likely to offer, like liver, egg yolks, and pureed moose thyroid glands (what, you’re not giving your baby moose thyroid?).

2. Full-fat dairy.

Dairy isn’t universally lauded in the Primal community, but I’d guess a plurality of Mark’s Daily Apple readers eat some kind of dairy, whether it’s butter, yogurt, cream, or milk. If for whatever reason you’re unable to procure dairy from grass-fed cows (no, not everyone lives near a Trader Joe’s with affordable and ample stocks of Kerrygold grass-fed butter, sadly), make sure the full-fat dairy you do eat is organic. Organic dairy ensures a few things, assuming the producers follow the required guidelines. First, the latest rules stipulate that organic dairy cows must graze on pasture for the full length of the local grazing season, during which time they must obtain at least 30% of their calories from grazing. Local grazing seasons last at least 120 days, but often much longer, so your organic dairy will be coming from cows who eat at least a decent amount of fresh, actual grass. Second, conventional dairy cows eat conventional, pesticide-laden corn and soy, and those pesticides show up in the full-fat dairy. Most samples of regular butter, for example, contain pesticide residues, while organic butter does not.

3. Beef.

Organic meat cows must meet the same guidelines as organic dairy cows — pasture access during grazing season, 30% of calories from said pasture, etc. — so their meat is going to have at least a portion of the same benefits as full-on grass-fed meat, like improved CLA content, greater micronutrient status, and better flavor (if you like the actual taste of beef, that is). They’re far from fully grass-fed, true, but far better than conventional meat. Although organic meat from grocery stores will likely be raised on soy and corn, the feed will be neither genetically modified nor rich in pesticides. And organic animals aren’t allowed to receive antibiotics, nor are they pumped full of hormones. Most pesticides and contaminants preferentially accumulate in the adipose tissue, too, so especially make sure the fatty meat you eat is organic.

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Recently by Mark Sisson: Alcohol: The Good and the Bad

The hangover is an interesting beast. Like Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and any other huge, hirsute crypto-hominid, nearly every culture and every nation has an extensive literature (whether it's entombed in writing or not) on the subject of hangovers. After all, alcohol is the universal intoxicant, and hangovers are the inevitable consequence of overindulgence.

Or are they?

Mike, a reader, recently wrote to me with the tale of the missing hangover:

I have been following the Primal Blueprint for over 2 months now. My diet, fitness, etc — has been very strict with one exception — The occasional drink.

While I don’t particularly crave alcohol, when I am around it in social settings — I will indulge in 1 to several drinks, then walk home. This past week I have had 2 occasions where I have been under extreme duress while also finding myself in social settings with people buying me ‘drinks’ — mainly bourbons. In the past if I went on a binge I might find myself worshiping the porcelain goddess or at the minimum wake up with a headache, disoriented, and bubbly guts. I would then feel crappy for the most part of the day, and not want to eat anything. At 38, I would think that it would only get worse.

But something has changed.

I did a tally, 9 makers mark neat and 3 ‘lite’ beers over 5 hours. I walked home, went to bed, and woke up in plenty of time to go to work. Ate some breakfast, and never felt the worse for it. The following nite 7 beers and 3 wines over a 4 hour time period, I polished off the nite with some organic locally grown smoked ribs from one of the local farms that does ‘drunk food’ and walked home. This morning, no headaches, no problems. There was a minor loose stool movement and that was it. It’s off to work and sharp as a tack.

I have no plans of continuing this drinking trend and plan on drying out over the next week, however I am perplexed by the ‘lack’ of effect.

Is it because I more efficiently rid myself of toxins?

Is it because I have an increased metabolic rate?

Perhaps it’s how my body is burning fuel?

It is not the walk, the glass of water I have before going to bed, or the late night meat. These are all things I did before and when I would have that occasional binge, I would pay for it. I’m curious if others have had the same reaction or if they have insight as to why the ‘hangover’ has disappeared?

Mike

What is a hangover, exactly, why do they happen, and how can we prevent their occurrence or mitigate their severity?

Well, the obvious, absolutely foolproof way to prevent hangovers is to abstain from alcohol, but that's not the focus of this post. We can avoid drink altogether and never get a hangover, sure, just like we can avoid any of the potentially negative consequences (unplanned pregnancy, disease) that accompany sexual intercourse by abstaining from any and all sex — but where's the fun in that? People are going to drink, even healthy, Primal people, and it doesn't help to simply say, u201CDon't drink.u201D People drink. Let's figure out how to manage this fact.

Your basic, garden variety hangover manifests in several classic symptoms: headaches, dry mouth, spacey-ness, fatigue, depressed mood, physical weakness, lack of concentration, sweating, anxiety, sensitivity to light and sound, irritability, extreme thirst, extreme hunger, among others. Some only get the headache and the fatigue, while others are sidelined with the whole shebang. Either way, a hangover absolutely and unequivocally sucks. Its only benefit may lie in its capacity as negative reinforcement for the next time you decide to binge.

Diuresis and Dehydration

The presence of ethanol (alcohol) in the body induces diuresis, or an increase in urination. We've all noticed this. You're having a few with friends and having to head off to the bathroom in between each drink, where you find yourself expelling more liquid than you're taking in. What gives? Ethanol inhibits the secretion of antidiuretic hormone (ADH, or vasopressin) by the pituitary; this is the hormone that keeps you from wetting yourself, and without it, the kidneys send water straight to the bladder, bypassing absorption by the body. When you urinate from ethanol-induced diuresis, it's mostly water (notice the color — it's very light), along with electrolytes necessary for proper bodily function. This leads to dehydration, which in turn leads to headaches (the thirsty body draws water from the brain, constricting it), fatigue, dizziness (lack of potassium and sodium will do that to ya), and dry mouth. Sound familiar?

Toxic Acetaldehyde Build-up

Another source of hangover woes comes from acetaldehyde, which is created when an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase breaks down ethanol in the liver. Acetaldehyde is far more toxic than ethanol itself, so the body then releases acetaldehyde dehydrogenase and glutathione to break down the acetaldehyde. If you stick to just a few drinks and space them out accordingly, your body's natural enzyme production can keep up. If you start binging, though, glutathione stores become overwhelmed and the liver must produce more. Meanwhile, acetaldehyde, which is between 10-30 times more toxic than ethanol, accrues in your body. Certain groups are underequipped to deal with alcohol, however. Women, for example, produce smaller amounts of acetaldehyde dehydrogenase and glutathione than men, making them more susceptible to hangovers. Many people of East Asian descent possess incredibly efficient alcohol dehydrogenase genes, thus increasing the amount of acetaldehyde produced from ethanol. Roughly half of those folks have inefficient acetaldehyde dehydrogenase genes, however, thus decreasing the amount of acetaldehyde that can be broken down. When these people drink, acetaldehyde accumulates faster and stays there longer, leading to an instant hangover.

Congeners

During fermentation and distillation, congeners — or byproducts of the processes — are produced. Congeners can include acetone, acetaldehyde, tannins, and even flavorants used to distinguish drinks. As a general rule, darker liquors contain higher levels of congeners, with brandy ranking highest. One study showed that whiskey drinkers suffered worse hangovers than vodka drinkers when both groups were given equal amounts of alcohol, with the higher levels of whiskey congeners taking the blame. Red wine, which tends to be high in tannins, is another famous hangover-inducer. The basic effect of ethanol-induced diuresis is enough to cause a hangover, but it seems that congeners can make things even worse.

Okay, so we've established why hangovers hurt as much as they do, but what can we do about them?

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What do we make of alcohol? In sufficient amounts, it’s a poison. It’s incredibly addictive. It destroys entire communities. It tears families apart and compels otherwise reasonable, upstanding individuals to commit terribly senseless acts. On the other hand, it’s a powerful social lubricant. The good stuff tastes great and can enhance the healthfulness of certain foods while inhibiting the unhealthfulness of others. It’s fun, it’s pleasurable, and it brings real (if chemically enhanced) joy to people. Moreover, we have a long and storied history with alcohol; it’s been an integral part of human culture and society for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.

So, what’s the deal? Is it good, or is it bad? Is it poison, or is it a gift? Let’s take a look at both sides of the story, which, as is often the case, isn’t exactly black and white:

First, the downsides.

It’s toxic.

Our ability to break alcohol down into less toxic metabolites didn’t arise because of our tendency to seek out fermented fruits. Over the course of an average day, the average human digestive system produces about three grams of ethanol just from the gut flora fermenting the gut’s contents. If we didn’t have the ability to metabolize and detoxify ethanol, those three grams would add up real quick and represent a huge toxin load on our bodies. After alcohol is consumed, a number of enzymatic reactions ensue. In the liver, an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase converts the ethanol to acetaldehyde, an incredibly toxic compound that’s been implicated in causing many hangover symptoms. An enzyme called acetaldehyde dehydrogenase converts the acetaldehyde into acetic acid, or vinegar (which is harmless unless you’re a cucumber). From there, you’re good to go. Sounds simple enough, right? Just let the enzymes do their thing. As long as you make those enzymes, the alcohol will be safely and effectively metabolized into table vinegar which can then be extracted to form a delicious salad dressing (that last part isn’t true).

Unfortunately, not everyone produces the same amount and quality of detoxifying enzymes. Many people of East Asian descent possess a dominant mutation in the gene that codes for aldehyde dehydrogenase, making it less effective. While they’re less likely to be alcoholics, folks with the mutation (characterized by a “flushing” upon ingestion) are at an elevated risk of liver damage and esophageal cancer.

It can give you fatty liver (and worse).

Around these parts, we usually talk about non-alcoholic fatty liver, a disease associated with sugar and fat intake coupled with inadequate choline to support the liver’s function. But notice that we have to qualify it with “non-alcoholic.” That’s because the most-studied type of fatty liver is alcoholic fatty liver. The mechanisms behind alcoholic fatty liver are myriad and multifaceted, but it ultimately comes down to the fact that you’re bathing your liver in a known toxin. Liver alcohol metabolism increases the NADH/NAD+ ratio, thereby promoting the creation of liver fat cells and a reduction in fatty acid oxidation; the result is added fat in the liver and impaired fat burning. Acetaldehyde, especially if it lingers for too long, also induces inflammation in the liver, which can ultimately progress to full cirrhosis and liver failure.

It can be carcinogenic.

Excessive alcohol intake is an established epidemiological risk factor for several cancers, including stomach, liver, and colon cancer (to name just a few; more than a dozen cancers are linked to alcohol abuse). In the stomach and liver, alcohol dehydrogenase converts ethanol into acetaldehyde, which is inflammatory and toxic. Alcohol that makes it through the stomach into the small intestine is also oxidized into acetaldehyde, this time by gut flora. While the liver produces the necessary enzymes to break down acetaldehyde into acetic acid, our gut microbes aren’t so well equipped and the acetaldehyde is allowed to linger longer.

It’s addictive.

While I’d argue that being addicted to anything will have a negative effect on your life, if not your physical health, being addicted to alcohol is particularly harmful because of how toxic it is — especially the more you drink. To get an idea of just how addictive it is, check out the results of this study: alcohol is less addictive than nicotine, crystal meth, and crack, but more addictive than heroin, intranasal amphetamine, cocaine, and caffeine. One’s susceptibility to alcohol addiction is often hereditary, too, meaning some people will be far more likely to become addicted than others.

It disrupts sleep.

A nightcap is a misnomer. Sure, it’ll help you fall asleep, but your sleep won’t be any better. In fact, as plenty of people reminded me in the comment section of last week’s post on sleep, alcohol is a serious disrupter of sleep quality. It increases the incidence of sleep disruptions, and it perturbs the healthy sleep cycles.

It affects judgment and perception.

Even though alcohol destroys a person’s ability to safely maneuver a motor vehicle, one in three car accidents that result in death involve drunk drivers. Everyone knows that you shouldn’t drive drunk, but why does it keep happening? A recent study even showed that just a single drink caused subjects to find “intentionality” in other people’s actions (PDF). Subjects who got the alcohol were less likely to view simple actions as accidental, rather than intentional. Thus, when you’re under the influence of alcohol, you’re more likely to take personal offense at the guy bumping into your shoulder, the lady stepping on your shoe, or the person “staring” at you from across the bar. Because, after all, they “meant” to do it, right? The title of the study sums it up quite nicely: “‘There’s No Such Thing as an Accident,’ Especially When People are Drunk.”

It promotes bad eating.

Everyone who’s ever gotten at least a buzz from a glass or two of wine or a mixed drink has felt the often irresistible urge to snack, to order something salty, crunchy, and sweet from the menu, to beg the driver to swing by the greasiest nastiest fast food drive-thru. This is a well-documented phenomenon. Alcohol affects both active overeating and passive overeating. Active overeating describes the conscious decision to “get some grub.” Passive overeating describes the amount you eat once the food is in front of you. Both are enhanced by alcohol. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if you’re drinking at a Primal meet-up, where you’re surrounded by relatively healthy food, but that’s not where most drinking occurs.

It gives hangovers.

What’s worse than a bad hangover? I’m unaware of anything, at least on a physical scale. Sure, you can mitigate the damage, but the fact that a hangover even exists tells us that whatever we’re ingesting that gave us the hangover is bad for us (in the amount we ingested, at least).

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Today’s edition of “Dear Mark” runs the gamut. The topics will be somewhat familiar, since I tackle wheat, minimalist shoes, high-fat diets in the news, and vitamin D, but with interesting spins on each. First, I discuss the link between wheat and asthma. Next, I do a somewhat exhaustive search of the available winter minimalist shoe options, a topic that I’ve never had cause to explore for myself. Since I do this for you guys, though, I tried to help out. After that, it’s my quick but (in my mind) pretty conclusive take on the latest article to pin cognitive decline on a high-fat diet for a reader who’s dealing with a similar condition herself (or himself; the gender of the name “Jo” is somewhat ambiguous). And finally, I discuss whether or not there’s a best time of day to obtain vitamin D from the sun.

Let’s get going:

Mark,

I love the website and your books. I have been eating paleo for the past 4 months and notice a huge difference in my athletic performance and general out look on life. I have suffered from asthma my entire life. After eating a sandwich made with french bread (refined wheat) or a plate of pasta (which is rarely now), I find my breathing slightly labored even while sitting. Is there any research supporting the removal of gluten and wheat help asthmatics?

I would love to know you thoughts…

Drew

I think so, yes. Something called baker’s asthma, which has been identified since at least the 1700s and is exactly as it sounds, is linked to the ingestion (this time via the clouds of airborne flour to which bakers are constantly exposed) of gliadins, the protein subfractions that make up gluten.

There’s also a related condition called wheat-dependent exercise-induced anaphylaxis where wheat-related proteins make it through the intestinal wall into the blood and cause an immune response that manifests as an asthma attack. It’s “exercise-induced” because exercise seems to speed up the rate at which the wheat gliadins make it into the blood, but even those at rest had evidence of an immune response to the gliadins.

There’s also evidence of plain-old wheat-induced asthma — no exercise necessary.

I’d say you’re on to something, Drew. You can keep experimenting if you like, but I’d suggest just staying away from the stuff myself! Good luck!

Hey Mark. I’m very addicted to my Vibrams, and with this nor’easter coming through I had to go back to my winter boots, and while they do keep me dry and warm, I’m hating it!

Tried looking through the site but didn’t find anything as far as some type of minimalist shoe for winter? Any recommendations?

Wish Vibrams made a winter type shoe. I see they used to make one that kind of looks like it would be helpful, but they don’t sell it anymore.

Thanks!

Jason

I share your addiction. For folks who actually have real seasons with a real winter, the minimalist winter shoe is something of a white whale — an enigma hovering just out of reach, a product that you know should exist but that you can never actually pin down. I’ve never really looked into it for my own feet, since they rarely see cold weather, but let’s see what’s out there, yeah?

First, a quick glance at the minimalist wintery offerings from the well-known companies out there:

Merrell

Men — Nothing meant for winter that I could see.

Women — Barefoot Life Frost Glove: waterproof, insulated, Vibram sole.

Vivo Barefoot

Men — The Off Road Hi and Off Road Mid look to be decently protective options.

Women — They’ve got an entire winter boot collection for women, albeit a fairly small one.

Softstar

Unisex — Adult Phoenix Boot: sheepskin lining, 5 mm Vibram sole, lighter and more flexible sole as of 2012, roomy toebox (very important, in my experience, for true barefoot feel), naturally water-resistant.

Now, how about the shoe options that might not be officially minimalist but are close enough?

Russel Moccasin now makes a full lineup of minimalist moccasins, some of which are winter proof. They’ve been around for decades, so they should be pretty high quality.

Otz Shoes has a Troop Boot. It’s not billed or promoted as minimalist, but as this review from Birthday Shoes suggests, it can certainly be modified to become an effective, minimalist winter boot. They’ve got ‘em in women’s, too.

There’s an actual minimalist army boot out, as well — the Belleville Minimalist Training Boot. Read the review.

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It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

Dear Mark,

I first heard about the Primal Blueprint from Slick Rick, the long haired, five fingered shoe wearing odd ball my cousin married. He had ditched grains four years before and never looked back, and was always dropping jokes about how he loved bacon. I thought he was crazy with his caveman talk and dismissed his low carb philosophy as one that didn't fit into my modern diet.

You see, I took carb-a-holic to an extreme, consuming well past the 600 carb a day average of most Americans. I maintained a medium body size until I hit college, when I gradually began to pack on the pounds. By the time I was married at 28, I was overweight headed to obese, suffering from gastric reflux, fatigued, and unmotivated. The big blow came when my general practitioner diagnosed me with PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) after several unsuccessful months of trying to get pregnant with an irregular cycle. I assumed this was some genetic curse (after all, that's what every doctor I talked to told me) and started down the path of Metformin and fertility drugs. I felt miserable, the meds made me crazy, and I got fatter on my SAD. After two years of failure, we took a break. I hated the way I looked and felt now 60+ pounds overweight and still without a baby. I joined a gym and hired a personal trainer determined to at least feel good about my body. Following six months of cardio four days a week, light weight training, and a restricted diet of healthy whole grains and low fat tasteless foods, I had a pathetic 15 pound weight loss, raging appetite, and shin splints to show for it. By this time my husband and I had decided to adopt, and brought home our little boy in October of 2009. I had a renewed u201Chealthyu201D outlook and was determined to feed our growing family the best balanced nutrition I knew. We had the food pyramid down pat. Our diet was filled with whole grains, lean meats, and processed carbs and over the next two years I continued to gradually gain another 20 pounds.

As 2012 approached, and I began to think about New Year's resolutions, my mom decided to motivate me and my sister-in-laws with a little weight loss challenge. She set up a Facebook group for us and a few friends to help encourage each other along the journey, told us to pick our diet of choice, and rewards were set for each month's weight loss percentage winner. Almost everyone but myself went with Weight Watchers. I just couldn't do the same old failing plan again. My mind began to drift back to Slick Rick. Could he be right? Maybe he wasn't so odd after all. His diet seemed to go against everything that didn't work for me in the past. My gut (no pun intended) told me I was eating too many carbohydrates, so I decided to give it a try and devoured The Primal Blueprint in just two days. I don't like to do anything halfway so I fully committed to change and ditched grains, potatoes, and sugar, and ate lots of meat, vegetables, and fruit. I kept a Primal journal for the first few weeks to help me get started. Immediately the weight started to melt off just as I had read that it would. I began walking a moderate amount because of the new energy I gained, and slowly worked up to sprinting once a week and body weight exercises. Within a month, my gastric reflux was gone and I could eat all kinds of Primal foods that had given me indigestion in the past when paired with grains. I never felt deprived, and noticed heightened taste awareness of foods that wouldn't have appealed to me previously. I lost my cravings for sugar and carbs and the desire to consume the foods that had been making me fat for years. I found foods that I enjoyed just as much or even better than those that had gotten me in trouble on the scales. I regained my love for bacon! I started intermittent fasting a couple times a week and was surprised at my lack of hunger pangs. At last! I was a fat burning beast!

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