The Primal Blueprint (46 page)

“A Primal Breakfast, a Primal Lunch, and a Sensible Primal Dinner”

I asked the clothing store clerk if she had anything to make me look thinner, and she said, “How about a week in Bangladesh?”

—
Roseanne Barr

These are the critical elements of the
Primal Blueprint
weight-loss approach:

Minimize carb intake
to control insulin production and enable stored body fat to be burned for energy.

Optimize protein intake
to preserve energy levels and maintain or increase muscle mass while you exercise.

Optimize fat intake
to achieve high satiety levels, provide energy, and eliminate hunger.

Engage in occasional Intermittent Fasting (I.F.) and deregulated meal habits
to produce accelerated caloric deficits that lead to greater fat loss.

Engage in a Primal Blueprint–style exercise program
that fine-tunes your fat metabolism, builds/tones lean muscle, and accelerates body composition improvements without exhausting you.

Avoid excessive regimentation or results obsession
in favor of a long-term perspective. Assess results monthly and don’t worry about daily calorie counting or frequent scale measurements.

Lose a pound or two of fat a week just by following the incredibly reasonable, flexible, and simple
Primal Blueprint
laws detailed in this book—can it be this easy? Let’s not mince words here. The science of reducing stored body fat requires you to burn more calories than you consume. Unless you plan to lose water and muscle tissue (and I know you don’t), losing one to two pounds of fat per week (your personal maximum rate within this range depends on your existing body weight, metabolic rate, and activity level) means an average daily deficit of 500 to 1,000 calories. It’s just unrealistic to lose weight safely any quicker than that without depleting muscle mass or becoming fatigued.

It’s also a truth of homeostasis and evolution combined with the abundance of modern life that it’s easier to pack on excess weight than burn it off. (We’ve fine-tuned our Grok-like ability to store excess calories!) So, now that you know the science of how the body stores and/or burns fat, it’s a simple matter of executing the right strategy.

The good news here is that when you do reach your desired body composition, all you have to do to maintain it is reasonably control carbohydrate intake to average 100 to 150 grams per day. Then, even if you consume excess protein and fat calories, your body will simply ramp up its metabolism enough to burn off extra fuel. This will happen in numerous ways. Your brain, enjoying stable blood sugar levels and optimal hormone balance, will inspire you to be more active, both consciously (through more spirited workouts, for example) and subconsciously (with a generally more energetic pace through your day). Your core temperature will rise slightly (through increased internal cellular activity), and you will even experience increased energy dissipation in the mitochondria within each of your cells.

Primal Blueprint
–style eating allows you to eat more calories than a restrictive diet yet be far more successful losing body fat. This seemingly illogical claim has played out in numerous studies where control groups ate the same number of calories and had the same activity level but ate different kinds of foods. The disparate results achieved were attributed to what scientists call a
metabolic advantage
provided by eating certain foods (namely, those that moderate insulin production).

The idea is to hit the sweet spot where carbs have been reduced just enough so that your body prefers to burn fats and a moderate amount of ketones instead of relying so much on glucose. This carbohydrate sweet spot is 50 to 100 grams per day for most people, with the range depending on your size, age, sex, and metabolism. Consume more carbs than that (up to 150 grams a day) and you’ll maintain weight quite easily without gaining, but you’ll have to work a little harder to burn it off. On the other hand, it’s certainly healthy to take in less than 50 grams per day of carbs once in a while (as I discussed in
Chapter 3
, you could live on zero carbs for a long time), but the idea is to stay just on the fringe of ketosis. In the sweet spot, you will maintain high energy levels (no more insulin crashes), you can exercise (including regular intense sessions) and recover without getting exhausted, and you won’t exhibit any of the unpleasant byproducts of severely carb-restrictive diets that put you in full-on ketosis. These include the annoying “ketone breath,” insufficient vitamin/mineral intake (due to the severe restriction of vegetables and fruits), and poor compliance due to the deprivation and inconvenience involved in trying to bottom out on carb intake.

For those of you seeking detailed, quantifiable guidelines for your caloric intake, you can follow this simple formula that begins with obtaining a calculable level of protein sufficient to preserve lean muscle mass, strictly limiting carbs to an average of 50 to 100 per day, and using fat as the main variable to obtain your daily caloric needs.

To ensure your success and comfort during the fat-reduction period, please make an extra effort to have appropriate Primal snacks available at all times. These include low-glycemic carbs (e.g., berries or crunchy vegetables) and foods high in protein and/or fat (nuts, seeds, trail mix, meat, cheese, etc.). If you experience some difficulty transitioning over from a carb-dependent diet to
Primal Blueprint
eating, grabbing a handful of nuts, a stick of beef jerky, or a hard-boiled egg when you get hungry can make all the difference in the world.

As you learned already, you need an average of 0.7 to one gram per pound of lean body weight per day to repair, build, and/or maintain lean muscle mass effectively and to adequately support numerous other metabolic functions dependent upon dietary protein. I like to calculate the average over a time period of at least four days (this is easy to do with an online calculator, such as found at
FitDay.com
) to account for the natural variance of your daily eating habits and activity level.

For an active female (1.0 factor) with 100 pounds of lean body mass, this is only 400 protein calories per day. For an active male with 150 pounds of lean body mass, this amounts to only 600 protein calories per day. Coupling protein minimums with our strict limitations on carbohydrates (at 50 to 100 grams per day during the fat-loss phase, even the male is under 1,000 calories per day before considering fat intake), it’s easy to see how you can reduce body fat at an accelerated rate. Furthermore, you can lose weight aggressively without the deprivation commonly associated with weight-loss efforts. With the
Primal Blueprint
weight-loss approach, you can sensibly enjoy rich, satisfying high-fat foods that will eliminate the slightest feelings of deprivation. While the “eating fat is okay for weight loss” idea might seem contradictory at first glance, it is valid; without insulin, eating fat will not make you fat!

Keep in mind I’m not asking you to undergo an expensive underwater body composition test to pinpoint your lean body mass and then carry around a calculator to nail your exact protein requirements every day. Your appetite will guide you effectively to meet your protein requirements, just as your thirst does for hydration requirements. That said, if you experience low energy or a reduction in muscle mass, you may want to delve further into just what you are eating to be sure the levels are in proper range. Jot down everything you eat for a few days, and then use a food calculator to determine how many grams of the various macronutrients you are consuming. I’ve provided some suggested meals with detailed nutrient breakdowns in this chapter to give you a feel for how healthy and satisfying the
Primal Blueprint
weight-loss plan can be.

Limiting your average carb intake to 50 to 100 grams per day will effectively moderate your insulin production and optimize your fat-burning process. At this level of carbohydrate intake, your body will be stimulated to burn more stored fats and manufacture a little extra glucose in the liver through gluconeogenesis. In this case, however, dietary protein will provide the substrate for gluconeogenesis instead of your precious muscle tissue, which I have discussed as a bad thing in the context of the fight-or-flight response (triggered by Chronic Cardio or a protein-deficient extreme diet).

As an added benefit of this process, your liver will generate a moderate level of ketones that will help spare muscle tissue and provide added fuel for cells that might otherwise require glucose. Hence, limiting your carbs to well under 100 grams per day will put you in a very mild (and desirable, because you’ll be burning fat like crazy) state of ketosis. If your batting average drifts above 100, your blood glucose levels will start to redirect energy pathways more toward glucose burning. I’m not asking you to split your carrot sticks down the middle nor to skimp on salad portions to stay under 100 grams. As you can see from this chapter’s examples, you can still enjoy abundant servings of vegetables and ample servings of fruit (nutrient-dense foods that are particularly important to consume when you are restricting calories and exercising diligently) and land in the optimum range for insulin control and weight loss. The key to meeting this seemingly strict guideline effortlessly is to virtually eliminate processed carbs from your diet—then it’s truly a breeze.

The variable for your energy needs and total calorie consumption is fat. If you are committed to success, you will make a concerted effort to eat only what you need to feel satisfied and energized. Because fat has such a high satiety factor, a little will go a long way. Even something like a handful of nuts can sustain you for hours when you skip meals or need an easy snack to keep you going. With the right meal choices and healthy snacks around, your intensive weight-loss experience will not involve the typical struggling and suffering of a “diet.” After you reduce the amount of body fat you desire, you can consume even more liberal amounts of fat without worrying about gaining weight.

Let’s look at a case study of our old friend Ken Korg, a 40-year-old, five-foot-eleven, 197-pound, moderately active male with 25 percent body fat who wants to lose weight aggressively (near the maximum suggested rate of two pounds per week) following the
Primal Blueprint
. We’ll calculate Ken’s estimated daily caloric expenditure and suggested macronutrient intake based on
Primal Blueprint
guidelines. Then, I’ll present a list of suggested meals and snacks with accompanying macronutrient analysis. The day’s example will show how Ken can enjoy sensible, satisfying meals and snacks and still achieve a dramatic improvement in body composition by meeting the average macronutrient guidelines for a single month. Throughout these examples, remember to focus on the concept of
averages
. While it’s instructive to examine a detailed daily example of both expenditure and intake to understand how we can properly achieve caloric deficits, in reality you will have days where you exceed your carb limit, fall short of your protein limit, and exercise more or less than the averages in our calculations.