The Primal Blueprint (50 page)
Read The Primal Blueprint Online
Authors: Mark Sisson
While the insulin control and intense sprint sessions might be the more exciting elements of the
Primal Blueprint
weight-loss plan, you should not discount the importance of the supporting lifestyle elements that can make or break your success. Getting enough sleep (including naps, which trigger positive hormone flow, balanced appetite, more energy for and faster recovery from exercise), sunshine (vitamin D enhances all cellular function, including fat metabolism), and even taking the time to play regularly will greatly assist your weight-loss goals. It’s time to start walking your talk, stop burning the candle at both ends, and make the right choices to allow your genes to express themselves optimally. When you follow the laws of the
Primal Blueprint
, the weight you want to lose will come off naturally.
I believe there is a bigger picture to observe that involves optimism, positive thoughts, and enjoyment of the process when you pursue body composition changes. The subject of body composition is laden with failure, deprivation, restriction, self-limiting beliefs (“I have the fat gene”), and superficial judgment from society (here’s a sampling of
Shape
magazine article teasers: “Cellulite Solution,” “Firm Your Trouble Spots,” “Simple Ways to Age-Proof Your Body from Head to Toe”). It’s critical to approach the subject with a positive attitude and an appreciation for the process. Your primary motivation must be to enjoy a higher quality of life and better health. The by-product of a change in body composition is not something to obsess about, measure, and judge as success or failure each day or each week, but instead to experience effortlessly as a consequence of lifestyle change driven by higher ideals than wanting to look good in a bikini for your summer vacation in Hawaii.
After a few months of progress, you often arrive at a frustrating point where the weight stops coming off, the sustained run of high energy levels fizzles a bit, or you stop building extra muscle. That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, because the body is so well-tuned to adapt to any situation. Even with carefully restricted carb intake, your body may react to a sustained period of fat loss by taking subtle actions to drift closer toward homeostasis. For example, genes could “down-regulate” insulin receptors and other metabolic systems in the interest of preserving fat – a crucial survival mechanism for millions of years.
Accept that plateaus are going to happen and exercise a little patience. Weight loss does not happen in a linear manner—there are simply too many variables and homeostatic forces at work. When I say you can “average a pound or two a week” of fat loss, I’d like you to consider this statement with a four-month or six-month timeline attached. I know we are conditioned to a “what have you done for me lately” mentality, but we are dealing with lifestyle change here, not journal entries of happy faces or frowns based on your scale numbers or food calculator graphs and charts.
I guarantee you that making some elementary Primal changes (e.g., eliminating grains from your diet to regulate your carb intake to average less than 100 grams per day; adjusting your exercise program to refrain from Chronic Cardio and add some brief, intense sessions to the mix) will result in a certain amount of “effortless weight loss”, as I promise on the cover. Clearly, there is a range of outcomes based upon individual factors (e.g., compliance rate as I’ll discuss in the following sidebar, life stress levels, and how long and how severely you have diverted from
Primal Blueprint
laws before embarking on this journey). A female might effortlessly go from 185 pounds to 152 in six months, at which point, she might long to drop into the 140s and find the process a bit more difficult.
One of my favorite sayings—whether it has to do with business, fitness, or balancing the varied demands and responsibilities of daily life—is, “If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.” There is a reason you don’t see 80 percent of American adults sporting single-digit body fat nor dozens of runners flying by in the park at a pace of six minutes per mile. If you are unsatisfied with your results after months of devoted effort, revisit the following sidebar and this Troubleshooting section and consider making an increased commitment to achieve superior results. Rest assured that there are no mysteries involved here, nor even much genetic “good luck” that we are so conditioned to believe is important. It’s all up to you, and how you can direct your genes to do the right thing.
Avoiding the Three Biggest Reasons for Weight Loss Failure
1. Lack of awareness and/or lack of commitment to actually moderate your carb intake to “sweet spot” levels
. If it turns out from your online pie graph results that you have been a little loosey-goosey here, I promise you that even a few days of Primal-style low-carb eating will cause noticeable changes in your appetite and an increase in your energy level—and lead you on the path to the promised land. Start your day tomorrow with a Primal Omelet and notice how your inclination to snack in the hours afterward is eliminated. Keep the momentum going with a Primal Salad for lunch, followed by a meat and vegetable dinner, and you’ll see how these (and many other)
Primal Blueprint
–approved meals leverage one another to get you off the carb-insulin-stress response-sugar craving cycle and into round-the-clock fat burning.
2. Failure to stock up on Primal Blueprint–approved foods
. Dropping from several hundred grams of carbs down to 50-100 range essentially means you must eliminate the foods that once served as major energy sources (albeit very poor, quick-burning sources) throughout your day. If you have no logs around (filling, nutritious, long-burning food) and your flame is petering out, your reaction might naturally be to fan the flames with wads of newspaper (cheap carbs). Make absolutely sure that you stock your home, office, car, and backpack with
Primal Blueprint
–approved snacks, such as my favorites mentioned in the
Chapter 4
sidebar. (The Primal Approved - At a Glance sidebar at the end of the book summarizes healthy eating choices and also what foods to avoid.) Reach for them any time you need an energy boost or feel a sugar craving coming on.
3. Lack of awareness/commitment to Primal Blueprint–style exercise program
.
Many exercisers are unaware of their working heart rates and the effect they have on metabolic rate and stress levels. Because the perceived exertion of aerobic exercise (75 percent or less of maximum heart rate) is extremely moderate, most exercisers (again, misguided by Conventional Wisdom) push too hard; equating suffering—with getting in shape. Walk through the room of a typical Spinning or Step class or along the window lineup of cardio machines at an urban health club and note the suffering etched on the faces of the participants. For the most part, America’s devoted exercisers—a culturally elite anomaly in the world’s fattest, most sedentary nation—are burning sugar and tiring themselves out from their well-meaning efforts. While I still favor an intuitive approach over a mechanical one, many exercisers have benefitted from purchasing a heart rate monitor and using it for several months to get a clear picture of what 75% feels like. This practice will help you develop the discipline to keep your cardio efforts in the optimal range.
Chapter Summary
1. Primal Weight Loss:
You can lose one to two pounds of body fat per week on the
Primal Blueprint
program by targeting optimal intake levels of each daily macronutrient, fasting intermittently, doing
Primal Blueprint
–style workouts and approaching the challenge with a positive, process-oriented, big picture attitude.
2. Macronutrients:
Adequate protein intake (0.7 to one gram per pound of lean body mass, depending on activity level) will preserve muscle tissue (and metabolism) during calorie-restriction efforts, avoiding the “crash and burn” effect of most diets. Maintaining the “sweet spot” of 50 to 100 grams of carbohydrates per day will moderate insulin production and allow stored body fat to be your primary energy source. Fat intake will be the main variable to ensure you are satisfied and nourished at each meal, making your weight-loss efforts effective, realistic, and even enjoyable.
3. Korgs:
Ken and Kelly Korg can achieve their ambitious fat-reduction goals eating delicious, nutritious
Primal Blueprint
–style meals. When the carb intake sweet spot is observed and protein requirements are met, ample amounts of fat will provide a high satiety factor at meals but will not result in excess fat storage thanks to low insulin levels.
4. Exercise:
Exercise can complement the main variable of optimal nutrient intake to support and accelerate weight-loss success. Increase low-level activity, make hard workouts even harder, and understand that the commitment to changing your body requires focus and dedication.
5. Intermittent Fasting:
I.F., whether deliberate or as a natural course of fluctuating mealtimes (now that stored body fat instead of ingested carbs is your preferred energy source), will create caloric deficits that lead to fat reduction and effortless long-term maintenance of ideal body composition. You can engage in I.F. by skipping meals, eating in a condensed window of time, eating morning and night but not in between, or engaging in planned fasts lasting for 24 hours or more.
6. Troubleshooting:
If your progress slows, try being more diligent in hitting the carb intake sweet spot (using an online nutrient calculator to know exactly where you stand), moderating your life stress levels (utilizing the
Primal Blueprint
lifestyle laws), adopting a positive mind-set, and realizing that plateaus in your progress rate are natural and acceptable, thanks to our bodies’ innate desire for homeostasis.
Conclusion
Time to Party like a Grok Star!
A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one part of his body; the wishbone
.
—
Robert Frost
As we near the end of the book, I want to call attention to the special place in my heart that
Chapter 2
, “Grok and Korg,” occupies. I’ve been fascinated by the “Primal” concept for nearly two decades. (I self-published my
Training and Racing Duathlons
book using the name Primal Urge Press in 1988!) As an athlete and a coach, I’ve reflected on the Primal theme constantly—inspiring athletes to balance the unnatural act of endurance training with proper recovery and lifestyle support and to temper our competitive human instincts with common sense to avoid burnout.
My work in the fields of nutrition and personal training and my immersion into the health community on the Internet have enlightened me about the realities of everyday modern life for the masses. While we are making progress in some ways, I am increasingly disturbed by the seemingly inexorable drift farther and farther away from natural, healthy, evolutionary behavior in the technological world.
As my staff and I worked through the stages of
Chapter 2
—conceptual, research, first draft, editing, soliciting external feedback, and revisions—I finally had the chance to print a fresh copy, sit on a lounge chair in my yard, and truly “read” the material for the first time. I have to admit I was downright horrified. I questioned whether people would think the commentary was sensational or unrealistic and be turned off accordingly. I returned to my computer, reviewed all the references, connected more research, and generally made darn sure this was an accurate and realistic picture of modern life.
Unfortunately, the draft withstood my own devil’s advocate scrutiny as well as that of numerous health, medical, nutrition, psychology, and sociology experts. Family and career men in their 40s and 50s take prescriptions left and right, families frequently feel that life is too hectic and stressful to align with the broad definition of
health
, and teenagers often feel overpressured and disconnected from parents. Today’s kids have too much body fat and too little physical fitness. We eat too much beige stuff and not enough green stuff. We avoid exercise and sit at desks all day staring at a screen in the name of increased productivity. We go home at night and stare at a bigger screen in the name of relaxation. We stay up too late and then awaken to the stressful screech of an alarm clock. We are stressed by bills, traffic, air, noise, digital pollution, the future, and all kinds of anxiety we manufacture in our restless minds. Our first line of defense when our genes react as they are programmed by these lifestyle habits is prescription drugs, which treat symptoms quickly but, over time, weaken our natural ability to achieve homeostasis.
As we bombard our genes with these lifestyle risk factors, they respond the only way they know in an often futile attempt to maintain homeostasis and a desperate effort to keep us alive in the short term—with inflammation, early cell death, insulin resistance, atrophy, and so on. If you are an “above-average” American family, you can congratulate yourselves while remembering that “average” is actually borderline obese (64 percent of American adults are classified as overweight, of which one-third are classified as obese). In California, 40 percent of 10-year-old schoolchildren failed to attain a bare minimum aerobic conditioning performance standard known as the Healthy Fitness Zone (established by the Cooper Aerobics Institute), meaning that hundreds of thousands of “average” kids in California (what I consider to be a progressive, fair-weather state with a population arguably fitter than found in the United States as a whole) are technically classified “at risk” to develop serious health problems related to inactivity.
40 percent!
Take a big fat zero off that figure and you’d approximate the relevant statistic during the time of my youth.