Mark Sisson's Blog, page 278

What’s Behind the Mind-Body Connection?

We’ve probably all known it – or at least seen it. That bout of flu (or other “everyday” illness) with every imaginable and miserable symptom that seemingly comes out of nowhere and won’t release its grip for anything. It took root despite good eating and reasonable exercise, and it won’t seem to respond to any amount of care or remedy (conventional or complementary). Maybe you get a slight reprieve – a few days of hope when it seems to lift, but then you’re plunged mercilessly back into another ring of flu-ish hell. You feel like you’ll never know health or a decent night’s sleep again.

We can watch some strange and, at times, clear-sighted thoughts go by when we’re in the throes of this kind of persistent illness – either collapsed on the couch for another prostrate but restless hour (or driving ourselves ragged and miserable through the day to take care of duties we simply can’t let go of). What about all those nagging, worrying thoughts that have taken up so much mental bandwidth lately? What about the late nights stressing over child care, marital discord, a parent’s cognitive decline, job overload, financial pressure, midlife questions, or other potent issues? What about the lack of gratitude we’ve felt lately? What about the feeling that’s overtaken us recently that our lives have become too much hamster wheel and too little joy? Is our stress sending a message when it knocks us down and keeps us there long enough to respect the severity of its strain? Even if we got on the sick train in a good mental state, have we succumbed to frustration? Could that despondent attitude be perpetuating our wretched physical condition?

I’m not suggesting illness is some kind of spiritual visitation akin to A Christmas Carol showing us the error of our ways in a metaphysical parade (although severe fatigue can bring on some funky hallucinations). Some pathogens are stronger than others, but the fact is they benefit from the right conditions to set up shop in a particular body – and certainly to take over the whole place for weeks on end. Stress in all its forms, sleep in short supply and plenty of other physical as well as emotional factors provide the perfect setup for a pathogen’s hold. Our stress doesn’t of course create illness, but it can help harbor it and even create an ongoing loop of negative feedback that keeps us stuck both physically and psychologically.

Beyond the simple illustration of flu and frustration, how much does our overall mindset and emotional well-being feed our physical health? That’s the question behind the mind-body exchange that researchers have chased for decades (and philosophers have dissected for millennia). Just what’s behind the mind-body connection? How powerful is it really? How should it influence the way we approach our own health and happiness?

There are, of course, multiple angles at work here – everything from positive thinking to negative thoughts to embodied cognition to placebo (or flip-side “nocebo”) effect to emotional support to meditation to the psychology of pain. Just as the placebo effect seems to hold greater sway over some people more than others, the interchange of mind and body may differ from person to person, but it’s clear that our bodies don’t operate on a separate plane than our minds. The ramifications – and possibilities – of their interchange continue to reveal themselves.

On a basic level, we can all likely understand how physiological and psychological feelings manifest together in our bodies. Recently, a Finnish group of researchers created body maps of where specific emotions are experienced – a “topography” of the physical sensations universally associated with a wide range of emotions.

The visual representations of their results are striking. The hot energy or cold and drained emptiness in varying areas of our bodies illustrated in the representative figures, I think, are uncomfortably familiar. It would be an unnervingly intimate, personal detail of our inner experience – except these sensations are universally human.

However, our emotional experience can have much deeper impact on our physical state than simply a fleeting sensation. Over time or in intensive situations, our emotions and thoughts can result in direct changes down to the cellular level.

Study participants, for example, who showed more activity in a brain region associated with negative thinking (right prefrontal cortex) at the time of a vaccine administration showed poorer immune (antibody) response to the vaccine during the six month follow-up period.  Research has also associated negative thinking with reduced natural killer cell activity. On the other side of this coin, activities that induce the body’s so-called relaxation response have been shown to boost immune function.

Yet, even beyond immune function, we find additional effects. The fact is, studies suggest our thoughts – whether we choose them or they’re induced through the placebo process – can influence everything from how fast our cells age to how we rate our quality of life to how much mobility and even visual acuity we have.

Research has demonstrated the long-term impact of chronic stress on the body’s overall health and aging process. A UCLA study, for example, implicates cortisol in shortening telomere length. The stress hormone suppresses the activation of the enzyme telomerase that is responsible for keeping immune cells healthy and “young.” Telomere length is regarded as a measure of physiological aging and immune function.

In one related study, breast cancer survivors who were experiencing distress participated in either an 8-week meditation instruction, a support group or a control group. At the end of the eight weeks, those who received either of the interventions maintained their telomere length, while telomere length in the control group has shortened. Psychological support offers clear physiological results.

From a placebo-based angle, a small study of sixty Parkinson’s patients showed that those who received a “sham” surgery reported experiencing better quality of life a full year post-”surgery.” (PDF) As the researchers note, even their doctors, who didn’t know whether particular patients had received the actual surgery or not, rated their neurological functioning better at the twelve month mark. Although participants who’d received the true surgery displayed (as a whole) better movement capacity, in some cases “sham” recipients experienced dramatic changes in ability, including the transformation from years of physical inactivity to hiking and skating.

If these illustrations sound fantastical, consider the statistic that over half of people who seek out medical assistance from specialties as diverse as cardiology to gynecology to neurology manifest symptoms for which no physical cause can be determined. The stories we tell ourselves – and those we accept from others (whether they be to our benefit or detriment) in some complex way appear to partially orchestrate what happens in our physiological systems.

Finally, what if our very perception of our age and ability could be markedly shifted in a matter of a few days by mere external suggestion? Ellen Langer, the groundbreaking psychologist who has specialized in the mind-body connection (I’ve mentioned her research before), sought to answer this question over three decades ago when she set up an experiment for the record books.

Langer designed an old monastery to entirely replicate 1959 from radio programs to assigned clothes to house decor – twenty-two years later. She then brought in two groups of men in their 70s and 80s to live in the fully historical residence for five days. One group was told to live among the memorabilia but be in the present day. The other group was instructed to “inhabit” the time period reflected in the design – to live as if they were twenty-two years younger in those years.

Without even mirrors or contemporary photos of themselves, the setting and activities steeped subjects in memories of their lives twenty-two years prior. Likewise, the subjects were treated as they would’ve been those decades prior with expectations to perform their own physical duties – including luggage carrying. The only difference was intention – to observe and reminisce versus to imagine and relive. Five days doesn’t sound like much – particularly for a scientific experiment, but five days of the carefully constructed immersion was enough to yield remarkable results.

This immersion, Langer and her team believed, would serve as a powerful “prime” to shift the participants’ thinking, allowing their bodies to then respond in the direction of de-aging. Among the changes observed or noted after those five pivotal days were improved strength, flexibility manual dexterity, better posture, suppler and younger appearance (as determined by independent observers) and other across the board improvements in both groups. The second group asked to inhabit the historical time and stage of life, however, demonstrated superior performance on a number of measures compared to the other “control” group, including better vision. Some had stopped using their canes. At one point they played a game of touch football.

Whether it’s Langer’s studies, meditation research or placebo/nocebo scenarios, the results of these explorations into the mind-body connection – or maybe continuum – gives us food for thought. We are, to a large extent, the age we believe we are. The healthier and more capable we perceive ourselves to be, the more we’ll become that. The more we feel cared for (whether by therapeutic intervention, positive doctor-patient relationship or support group participation), the better our well-being.

While our thoughts may not overturn every physiological circumstance, we underestimate the potential of reframing our experience. With good choices in addition to positive thinking, we maximize our capacity to create a vitality-filled life – within and without.

Thanks for reading, everyone. What are your thoughts on the mind-body interchange? Have you experienced its relevance in your health? Have a good end to the week.

The Quest for a Healthy Primal Mayonnaise (plus a Limited-Time Sweepstakes)

In a few short months, my team and I will be unveiling a new product that I’m confident you’ll be very interested in consuming. No, it’s not a book. It’s not an ebook, either, nor is it a new certification program or supplement. It’s something you eat – something you literally consume with your mouth. It’s a food product for which people have been clamoring and combing the grocery aisles, both brick and mortar and virtual, in vain. It’s mayo.

We’ll be releasing a Primal mayonnaise using avocado oil as the base.

Today, I want to tell you the story of how we arrived at the forthcoming mayo, and why we found that “organic” isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. (And don’t miss your chance to win a free bottle of Primal mayo. See the details at the bottom of this post.)

It started, as many great endeavors do, with Ultimate Frisbee.

One of my Sunday Ultimate buddies is a younger guy, early 30s, recently married. We’ve been playing together for a couple years now, and because of the constant exposure to me, he’s gradually gone more and more Primal – no small feat, seeing that he started vegetarian! He’ll pick my brain, ask me little things here and there (in the vein of “So, Mark, are flax seeds good for you?” or “Can I still drink milk?”) that were easy enough to answer between points.

But one stumped me. His wife was pregnant and really wasn’t into seafood. Since I’d stressed the importance of fatty fish for a growing fetus, he needed a way to make fish palatable for his wife (and future child). There was only one way she was willing to eat it: tuna salad. And not some Primal version of tuna salad using olive oil and balsamic vinegar. She wanted classic tuna salad dripping with mayo. Only problem, of course, was the sorry state of commercially-available mayonnaise. It’s all soybean oil. So his question was simple: is there an easy way to get good mayo?

Mayonnaise is kind of the white whale of the Primal/ancestral community. Go to any popular forum or blog and you’ll find someone asking “Is there an approved mayo I can buy?”

Not really. There’s one that combines a ton of different oils (coconut, sesame, olive, and more), but it’s really expensive and tends to separate and get all runny and strange.

“Just make your own!” people will say, and yeah, maybe you make mayo once or twice and it’s great. But there are major downsides. First, it’s fairly labor intensive. Sure, whisking is a great forearm workout but it can become torturous if you’re making more than a cup’s worth. Blending is faster, but you lose a quarter of it in the blender and another quarter in your arm hair scooping it out. But mainly, fresh mayo doesn’t last very long in the fridge, so you can’t keep a big batch on hand. And good luck whipping up mayo at midnight when pregnancy cravings take hold. Everyone likes the idea of making their own mayo, but very few people actually go to the trouble.

So my buddy’s quandary got me thinking: why isn’t there a good, affordable Primal mayo on the market? How many fish-averse but tuna salad-besotted Primal or paleo folks are going without a steady source of healthy, fatty fish flesh because of the commercial mayo situation?

A ton, as market research revealed. Fish aversion is one of the most common in the community. Good mayo is important for these people. I’ve tried and I’ve tried to make a mayo-less tuna salad that everyone likes, and it’s impossible. I know about a dozen other people who hate seafood, except for tuna salad. With a quality mayo you don’t have to consider a concession, that person can easily get their omega-3s and other seafood nutrients.

The search was on, then. This was to be a mass market mayo. A mayo for the everyman. A mayo that rekindled memories of mom’s tuna salad sans the oxidized cholesterol. We tried different recipes. Extra virgin olive oil wouldn’t do; we weren’t making an aioli and the oil had to complement, not take over the food. Coconut oil didn’t work; it was too saturated and solid at normal room temperature and the virgin oil made it inedibly coconutty.

We settled on avocado oil. It had a neutral flavor, at least in its final mayo form. It maintained good texture when refrigerated. And, as you’ll see below, it had some unique nutritional benefits.

From the start, we wanted Primal svocado mayo to be organic. Wholly, fully organic. But after extensive research we’ve found that not only is not cost effective (would you pay $15-20 for a jar of mayo?), it’s really not necessary from a health perspective. Let’s take a closer look.

First, mayo is oil-intensive. Mayonnaise is basically all oil with a bit of acid, some salt, some spices, and some egg. The rest is all oil. If you’re Hellman’s and you’re working with GMO soybean oil, price isn’t a problem and it’s why you can get a gallon of the fluffy off-white stuff at Costco for five or six bucks. If you’re using a premium oil like avocado where the price skyrockets for every additional ounce of oil required in the recipe, it adds up fast.

Second, organic avocado oil is just super expensive. Fifteen to twenty avocados have to die for every 8-ounce bottle of avocado oil. The price disparity between conventional olive oil and organic olive oil pales in comparison to the jump from conventional to organic avocado oil. I’ll spare you the details, but we would have had to (roughly) quadruple the per-bottle price to you if we went with organic avocado oil.

Go with a blend, you might suggest (and some people did). But we didn’t want to do a blend. You’ve probably run breathlessly up to a jar of “Olive oil mayonnaise” in the grocery store only to flip the label and see that it’s half canola. We were against that. That’s a terrible experience that no one should have to live through. Besides, we wanted pure avocado oil with a ton of health benefits and flavor that we didn’t want to dilute. And more importantly, it’s highly protective against inflammation, metabolic syndrome, and other issues we’d like to avoid.

For instance:

Eating avocado with a fast food hamburger meal eliminates the inflammatory response and endothelial dysfunction that results from eating the hamburger alone.
It protects the liver as much as extra virgin olive oil (without the prominent flavor) and improves cardiometabolic dysfunction, even in the context of a high sugar diet.
Avocado boosts nutrient absorption from other foods you eat with. Beta-carotene absorption and conversion into retinol, for example, increases when you eat avocado.
Avocado oil is also highly resistant to heat, about the same as olive oil (which itself is extremely stable).

But what about the pesticides? I mean, I just wrote a post questioning the validity of the supposedly safe daily pesticide intakes laid out by the EPA – and now I’m contemplating a mayonnaise recipe whose primary ingredient is non-organic. What gives?

Conventionally-grown avocado flesh is free of pesticide residues. Well, wait. I shouldn’t say that. Just 1.1% of avocado flesh samples contained residues of one particular pesticide, an insecticide called imiprothrin, while avocado oil samples show no evidence of pesticide residue.

As pesticides go, the literature on imiprothrin is reassuring. Inhalation of an imiprothrin-based insecticide is bad. In a study out of Egypt, rats were placed in rooms and subjected to an over the counter imiprothrin-based insecticide. Every minute, an overhead attachment sprayed aerosolized imiprothrin for 30 seconds. This went on for 15 minutes, after which the rats were shut inside for another 15 minutes. The whole process happened three times a day for 2, 10, or 30 days. These rats were basically hot-boxing a room with imiprothrin displacing much of the air for up to a month, and it didn’t quite kill them. It damaged their lungs extensively, but they survived until being sacrificed by the researchers.

And remember: only 1.1% of avocado samples showed evidence of residues of this stuff, and avocado oil showed none. In other words, the cost of using organic avocado oil simply isn’t justified.

So that’s the story of Primal avocado mayo.

In the end it’s just five ingredients: Avocado Oil, Organic Pasteurized Eggs, Organic Egg Yolks, Organic Vinegar, and Salt. The way it should be.

There may be some other Primal sauces, dressings and toppings coming, too. You’ll just have to wait and see.

We’ll do a full unveiling when it’s ready for shipping, but I couldn’t wait any longer. You’re really gonna like it, and I can’t wait to see what you think.

To mark this unofficial announcement, I’m giving you a chance to win a free jar!

Primal Kitchen™ Mayo Sweepstakes

Get your hands on the the very first batch of Primal Kitchen Mayo by entering our sweepstakes using the widget below. Simply share the news about the upcoming Primal mayo via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or your blog, and you’ll earn sweepstakes entries. You can enter as many times as you’d like over the course of the next 4 weeks.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

(The sweepstakes ends on Jan. 7. Only continental U.S. residents are eligible to win. Sorry everyone else!)

Thanks in advance to everyone that participates and helps spread the word!

Follow Primal Kitchen on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to Stay in the Know

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9 Worthy Alternatives to the Back Squat

As great as back squats are for strength, general fitness, and body composition, sometimes they just don’t work for a person. Maybe they cause knee, shoulder, or wrist pain. Maybe someone’s body proportions aren’t conducive to proper back squatting. Maybe their legs are too long to achieve good depth without compromising position. While there are dozens of articles imploring you to mobilize this or that joint and work out the kinks in this or that muscle so that the back squat will work, and those can be very informative and helpful, some people just don’t want to back squat. For whatever reason, it doesn’t work for them.

So – are these people doomed to perpetual chicken legs? Should they turn in their gym card forever and resign themselves to a life of sedentary existence?

Absolutely not. Plenty of other knee flexion exercises are worth doing. Let’s take a look at some of the best alternatives.

Goblet Squats

Goblet squats are easier on most bodies than back squats for two reasons: less weight is used (because you have to hold it in your hands at chin level) and they promote a more “natural” squatting technique. To perform a goblet squat, you hold a weight (kettlebell, weight plate, dumbbell, small child) at chin level, stay tall, and squat down between your legs while maintaining an upright torso. Many seasoned strength coaches use the goblet squat to teach beginners how to squat because it’s so intuitive.

That said, there are some extra details to keep in mind:

Tuck your elbows against your body. This creates a more stable “shelf” of support for the weight.
Keep your chest up.
Push your knees out.

Since you won’t be pushing heavy weights with the goblet squat, focus on higher reps and more overall volume. If things get dicey, dropping the weight in a goblet squat is way easier than dropping a barbell sitting on your back.

Here’s a textbook goblet squat.

Front Squats

To me, front squats have always felt more natural than back squats. There’s less thinking about what your joints are doing and which muscle groups you’re supposed to be activating. You just squat with a weight in the front rack position and the rest follows. It’s hard to mess up and round your lower back because if you lean too far forward during a front squat, you’ll just dump the weight.

According to a 2009 study on front and back squats in trained individuals, front squats exert fewer compressive forces on the knee and “may be advantageous compared with back squats for individuals with knee problems such as meniscus tears, and for long-term joint health.” Furthermore, front squatting less weight resulted in identical muscle activation as back squatting more weight.

The more upright posture inherent to front squats is also good for people with lower back pain by creating less shear stress on the vertebrae. An important cue to keep in mind during the front squat is “elbows up.” This creates a strong, stable shelf for the bar and cues the torso to stay firm and unyielding to forward tilt. If your elbows dip, the rest will soon follow.

The trickiest aspect is the rack position. There are three ways to hold the bar in a front squat — crossarm, Olympic, or with straps. See this video for an explanation of the different techniques.

Zercher Squats

In Zercher squats, the bar sits in the crook of your inner elbows about belly-high as you squat. This places more emphasis on the core and glutes. Anecdotally, people with knee pain during normal squats seem to flourish with Zercher squats. As for the weight resting on the arms, it hurts at first, but you get used to it. And if you don’t, you can always use a pad or a rolled up towel to dampen the pain.

They kind of force good form, too. As you squat down with the bar in the crook of your arm, your elbows fit neatly between your knees and prevent them from buckling inward. As you come up, be sure to thrust your hips fully forward at the top and stand up straight.

Initiate zerchers in one of two ways:

The more involved method – Deadlift the bar to just above the knee. Squat down, carefully letting the bar rest on your lower quads. Slip your inner elbows underneath the bar and stand back up. Commence Zercher squatting.

The easier method – Place the bar on a squat rack set to about waist height or a bit higher. Slip your inner elbows underneath the bar and stand back up. Commence Zercher squatting.

Bulgarian Split Squats

Several years ago, a strength coach named Mike Boyle  and promoting Bulgarian split squats in their stead. The split squat, he said, allows fuller loading of the legs being worked by removing the back from the equation. In a Bulgarian split squat, you place one foot behind you on an elevated surface and squat down until the back knee touches the floor (or a pad resting on the floor), keeping the weight on the foot in front of you. Getting your balance right can be tricky at first but once you’re comfortable it’s a great way to isolate individual legs without taxing your back. Many a trainee has woken up with throbbing glutes after a day of split squats.

Play with the height of the surface your back foot is resting on. If it’s too high, you’ll place some wonky shear stresses on your back. Lower the height if you find your back arching or your torso tilting too far forward. Stacking a few weight plates about six to eight inches high is good enough for most people.

Check out a video of the Bulgarian split squat in action.

Step-ups

Step-ups are fun. And they’re different than every other exercise in this post because they begin with the concentric portion of the lift. Most exercises begin with the eccentric portion. When you start with the eccentric portion, you’re dreading the concentric portion the whole way down. When you start with the concentric portion, the hard part is over right away and you just have to control the descent. There’s also no bounce to use as a crutch — just like the first deadlift of the set. Some people hate them, some love them. They’re definitely worth a shot and are a fantastic way to hit the glutes.

To target quads, hamstrings, and glutes, use a surface high enough that your knee is at 90° when you step onto it. The higher the box, the more glute and hamstring you’ll hit. Lower boxes will focus more on the quads. Try not to push with the off foot. If you find yourself pushing off despite best efforts, dorsiflex the off foot and touch down only with the heel.

Here’s a good video example of weighted step-ups with a barbell in the front rack position.

Walking Lunges

My go-to exercise when dealing with substandard hotel gyms is a few sets of walking lunges while carrying the heaviest dumbbells they’ve got. There’s something special about the combination of moving through space and lifting that adds a whiff of complexity and increases the training adaptations.

Lunges are relatively easy on the knees for many people who get knee pain during back squats. For others, it’s the opposite (but this post isn’t really intended for them). If you have problems with lunges, play around with the torso angles. Turning the movement into more of a single leg hip hinge by slightly leaning forward (shoulders over knees) can alleviate unpleasant forces to the knee.

Here are some (really) heavy walking lunges.

Reverse Lunges

Walking lunges are awesome, but they require magnificent balance. And if you’re pushing heavy weight, any minor mistake during the initial descent can send you and the weight tumbling. They also require a lot of room. Reverse lunges are generally safer, more stable, and they don’t require much space (because you do them in place).

Here are some reverse lunges with the hip hinge. Check out some Zercher reverse lunges, too.

Leg Press

After the Smith Machine squat, the leg press is probably the most maligned lower body workout across the entire Internet. Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength creator and enthusiastic promoter of the low bar back squat, thinks a person should only use the leg press to get strong enough to squat. That’s a fair assessment of its potential, but too many people have taken the extreme position that the leg press is useless or even counterproductive for building leg strength.

It’s true that the squat is more effective than the leg press. Squatting demands more from your body, and the subsequent rewards have the potential to be greater in turn. However, with greater rewards come greater risks, particularly if you have a preexisting lower body injury. In one study comparing the two, the squat had more potential for muscle development but greater risk for people with knee injuries.

These days, I’ll occasionally use the leg press machine. For my goals, it works. The leg press also seems to work pretty well for one of the strongest dudes I know, Keith Norris. If you don’t believe me, just watch him grind out a brutal set. Tell me that’s not a good lower body workout.

Whatever you do, resist the temptation to go so low on the leg press that your back starts to round at the bottom. This places a huge amount of really weird stress on your lower back. Stick to parallel and have someone watch (or film) you and confirm that you aren’t rounding your back.

Oh, and I almost forgot:

Bodyweight Squats

Don’t underestimate the efficacy of the simple bodyweight air squat. It’s great for mobility and surprisingly metabolically demanding. You can increase the difficulty — without changing the loading — by slapping on a weight vest; I frequently do this.

That’s it for today, everyone. If you’ve ever felt guilty for not doing or enjoying back squats, I hope you’ve found at least a couple exercises in today’s post to fill the void — and get you a fantastic workout in the process.

Thanks for reading. What are your favorite alternatives to the back squat?

You CAN Lose Weight and Get Healthy. Find Out How>>

Dear Mark: Unraveling a Stress Ball, Fiber for Plant-Hating Tot, Offal with Grains, and Exercising with a Cold

For today’s Dear Mark, we’ve got a four-parter. First up is one from a woman in her mid-30s trying to recover from a three-year bout of chronic stress — and all the metabolic fallout that entails. Are there any supplements to help with her situation? Second, what do you feed a picky kid who hates vegetables, hates fruit with peels, and needs more prebiotic fiber? I give a quick list of ideas for getting things moving again. Third, are traditional foods like haggis and liver pâté worth eating if they contain non-Primal ingredients you’d usually avoid? Are the nutrients found in offal really that important? And finally, I help a reader figure out whether she should be exercising while sick.

Let’s go:

Dear Mark,

I understand first-hand about the nasty effects of chronic, long-term stress. For three years, I had a stressful job I absolutely hated, and it negatively affected my sleep, my weight, my alcohol consumption, everything. I was a constant ball of anxiety who was gaining probably a pound a month, almost all around my waistline.

I left that job about five months ago and have moved on to something better. My weight has stabilized (heavy, but stable), I sleep better, and I’ve basically quit drinking. I also gained some muscle mass in all that extra weight, and now I can do 5×5 chest press with 60# dumbbells (I’m a 5’5″ female in my mid-30s.)

I have a couple questions, though, that I haven’t been able to find a solid answer to anywhere on the internet, and I’m hoping you can help.

Approximately how long will it take to undo the internal effects of all that stress? In other words, how long before the metabolic damage from the constant cortisol/adrenaline bath is reversed, and my system recalibrates itself?

Are there any supplements I can take, or activities I can practice, to help encourage the healing process?

Thank you,

SC

The good news is that recovery from chronic stress can happen fast. You just have to break the cycle.

The bad news is that you have to break the cycle. You have to break out of the dreaded “stress loop,” where you stress out about something going on in your life, stress out about how bad you’re feeling because of the stress, and stress out some more about what all that stress is doing to your physical health. From your email, it seems you’ve progressed to the “stressing about stress” stage.

A large amount of stress is caused by how we approach and think about stress, especially among the health-conscious. You’ve left the job and thus removed the primary stressor, but the way you handle stress and compound its effects internally probably remain. So, first, be sure to read the post I did awhile back on changing your relationship to stress. As you’ll see, if we can perceive stress as a “good thing” that helps us meet a challenge head on, our physiological response to it changes for the better.

Supplements? Certainly.

Supplements help us handle unprecedented environmental situations our naked physiologies aren’t equipped to handle. Vitamin and mineral supplements help us deal with the low nutrient food and depleted soils our ancestors never did. Antioxidant supplements help us deal with oxidative damage wrought by industrial pollutants, food-borne toxins, and the demands modern life places upon us. The amount of chronic stress we deal with today is also unprecedented and evolutionarily novel, and stress-reducing and mitigating supplements can help deal with it.

In fact, to battle my own ongoing struggles with chronic stress, one of the first supplements I put together was Primal Calm, a blend of adaptogens and anti-anxiety nutrients designed to mitigate some of the effects of stress and improve your ability to roll with the punches. It quells stress in the short term while teaching your body to be more resilient.. Primal Calm has:

Phosphatidylserine: If there is one supplement I’d recommend for its immediate stress mitigating effects, this would be it. The body doesn’t make much of it (and we don’t get much from our diets), but stress depletes what little we have. Since we get so much stress these days and it’s vital to the healthy functioning of nerve cell membranes, you could probably use some. PS works on both mental and physical stress, improving mood and blunting cortisol after physical exercise.
L-Theanine: Found most abundantly in green tea (especially matcha), L-theanine reduces anxiety and attenuates the rise in blood pressure associated with stress. It also increases GABA levels (GABA is the same “chill out” neurotransmitter targeted by Xanax and liquor) and increases brain wave activity in the alpha frequency, improving relaxation without inducing drowsiness.
Magnolia bark: This is one of my favorites. Magnolia bark also enhances the activity of GABA receptors in the brain and reduces stress hormones. In post-menopausal women, magnolia bark reduces anxiety and stress levels, and it’s even helped people lower body weight by reducing “stress eating.”
Rhodiola rosea: Rhodiola rosea is an adaptogen, meaning it helps normalize your stress response. It essentially improves your ability to handle stress. If you’re lagging, it’ll bring things up. If you’re freaking out, it’ll bring you closer to baseline.

You can also grab these supplements individually, of course, along with any of the others mentioned in my previous series on stress-reducing teas. Ashwagandha, for example, is a powerful adaptogen with the ability to normalize stress hormones in adults suffering from chronic stress after just 60 days. But give Primal Calm a look. I think you’ll find it really effective.

Hi,

My 3 year old son frowns at all vegetables (no fibers there). He also dislikes eatable peel on fruit and veggies (no fibers there either!). And for the next two years we live in China so forget whole wheat bread or pasta. Looking at what I manage to get into him he basically doesn’t eat any fibers… which is also becoming clear when he goes to the bathroom.

But he loves rice. So I’m thinking brown rice. High in fibers, but also high in anti-nutrients. So, would you say that the benefits of the fibers in brown rice outweigh the negatives of the phytates?

Many thanks,

Christine (Swedish reader, now living in Guangzhou)

You’re right to think about this. A healthy, diverse population of gut bacteria is important in childhood, arguably moreso than in adulthood because the immune system is still developing, and gut bacteria need fiber (and other nutrients that act like fiber) to eat, go forth, and prosper.

Okay. So I’m just going to rattle off a few options for you to consider. More than a few, actually. And then you can take all the suggestions and see what your kid will eat.

Brown rice is relatively (but not astronomically) high in fiber, and there’s evidence that a mere half cup of brown rice per day can improve the gut biome in adults (a toddler would need about a quarter of that), but there’s another good rice option to consider: parboiled rice. Parboiled rice is partially cooked, then allowed to cool, then packaged for sale. This increases the resistant starch content (PDF). As you may have already learned from previous posts on the subject, resistant starch isn’t a fiber but acts like one. It’s good food for your gut bacteria, and toddler gut bacteria can degrade it.

Resistant starch flours can help. Raw unmodified potato starch, banana flour, plantain flour, and/or mung bean starch (should be readily available in China) are all easy ways to get some prebiotics into your kid’s diet.

Does he like potatoes? Cooked and cooled potatoes contain lots of resistant starch. I bet he loves French fries (what kid doesn’t?). Cutting up cooked and cooled potatoes into strips and lightly sautéing them produces delicious fries with extra resistant starch. Sweet potatoes are good here, too.

Dates are an option. High in fiber and delicious and kids seem to love them. Yes, they’re also loaded with sugar, but that’s offset by the minerals, vitamins, and phytonutrients which make them a whole food with different physiological effects than an equivalent amount of pure sugar. Plus, an active toddler doesn’t need to worry about the carbs in fruit. Another benefit: the texture of the skin coupled with the fleshy tenderness of the fruit makes them dead ringers for severed zombie toes. Some kids dig eating zombie toes, so consider that angle if he initially balks at a proffered date.

Will he eat nuts? They’re great sources of prebiotic fiber. Almonds and pistachios in particular can really help the gut bacteria flourish.

There are tons of examples of edible, fiber-rich plants that are neither obviously vegetable nor come with “peels”: mushrooms, berries, winter squash (butternut, acorn, kabocha), leeks/onions/garlic, and jicama.

Jerusalem artichokes/sunchokes? Call them fartichokes and he might succumb.

Fruit flesh contains fiber, too — it’s not exclusively in the peels — so any peeled fruit is certainly better than none.

Smoothies can make anything work if he absolutely refuses to eat any of this stuff. Just get a good blender. Something like a Vitamix or a Blendtec, the kind that can make smoothies out of smartphones. I imagine your son is weird about textures in foods (many kids are), and a good strong capable blender is necessary for rendering unrecognizably smooth everything that enters its confines. Include some kefir or yogurt, which should also improve the bowel movements.

Good luck! I imagine our readers will have a ton of recommendations for you in the comment section (hint, hint).

Hi Mark,

I’ve recently been trying to incorporate more organ meats into my diet, with only limited success. I cannot abide most organ meats on their own (even the much loved combination of liver and bacon I find unpalatable, alas) and haven’t had any success hiding them amongst my meals.

Fortunately, I have found some types of offal I enjoy; traditional recipes such as haggis, black pudding, faggots and liver pâté. Unfortunately, most of these are made with added and non-primal ingredients, such as oatmeal in haggis and black pudding, or (sometimes) breadcrumbs in faggots.

What is your take on these sorts of foods? Is it worth eating them for the benefit of the organ meats? Or is it better to stay away from the ones with added ingredients?

Many thanks,

Alessa, UK

First choice: Stay away from the ones with added, non-Primal ingredients and lovingly embrace the ones without those ingredients. If better ingredients are available, I’ll always choose those.

Second choice if the first isn’t available: Eat them anyway. It’s worth eating them for the organ benefits, even if they have a few breadcrumbs (unless you’re sensitive/allergic to gluten) or some oatmeal (ditto).

Breadcrumbs don’t worry  me too much. As offal is a supplemental food rather than a staple, you wouldn’t be eating something like a faggot (the traditional UK food containing heart, liver, pork belly, herbs, and sometimes breadcrumbs) often enough that the breadcrumbs would pose serious issues. That goes out the door, of course, if you’re celiac or gluten sensitive. But most other people with generally healthy guts can probably handle a few breadcrumbs every other week if it means they’re also getting liver and heart.

You could also do a whole lot worse than the oats in haggis. Oats aren’t the worst grain. While the oat protein avenin appears to have some of the same problems as gluten in certain sensitive individuals, it doesn’t appear as if the problem is widespread or as serious. For example, kids with celiac disease produced oat avenin antibodies at a higher rate than kids without celiac, but neither group was on a gluten-free diet. When you put celiacs on a gluten-free diet, they don’t appear to show higher levels of avenin antibodies. It’s a familiar story: once you remove gluten or any other foods or behaviors that exacerbate leaky gut, other proteins become less problematic. The leaky gut is the main issue, and gluten just happens to be good at making guts leaky in almost everyone.

Liver pâté is probably your best bet. It’s usually made with butter instead of vegetable oil, it rarely contains any grains (I don’t see how it would improve the taste or texture), and since it’s to be eaten infrequently, one can more easily justify spending the money to obtain grass-fed or pastured liver pâté.

And finally, fork over the money for the best, freshest offal you can find because offal, particularly liver, breaks down quickly after slaughter. If you can nab a flash frozen lamb, beef, or chicken liver from the farmer who raised its former owner, there’s a good chance it’ll be sweet and smooth, rather than bitter and grainy. That’s the liver glycogen talking. Get a really good, sweet one and you can eat it sliced raw, sashimi-style.

Quick question, Mark: I have been under the weather this week – just slightly, but still so. I have been working out regardless, as I just needed the energy boost. However, I feel like perhaps it has left me needing more rest than my schedule allows. What is your advice on working out/exercising while nursing a cold?

I am 39 and have been following the Primal Blueprint lifestyle for about a year and a half.

Thanks,

Mary

In this case, the conventional view is righter than not: don’t exercise if your symptoms are “below the neck.” That means fever, chills, fatigue, sensitive skin that’s painful to the touch, diarrhea, vomiting, aches — any symptom like that means exercise should be avoided.

If your symptoms are “above the neck” — stuffy nose, headache, sore or scratchy throat — feel free to exercise. Just keep it lighter than you would otherwise and avoid exercise altogether if the symptoms are really intense, even if they’re “just” above the neck. You don’t want to be a stuff-nosed mouth breather with a ball of pounding pain for a head in the gym. That isn’t good for anyone.

If you’re unsure of where your symptoms fall, err on the side of caution and skip the tough workout. Instead, go for a walk. Do some stretching or mobility exercises. Try VitaMoves. Grab a yoga video off YouTube and try it out. Stuff like that is safe and helpful for recovery.

That’s it for today, folks. If you have anything to add that might be of service, add your comments below!

You CAN Lose Weight and Get Healthy. Find Out How>>

Weekend Link Love – Edition 325

Tuesday’s the last day to get in on the chance to win $500 worth of Primal foods from Thrive Market. Enter to win here!

The introductory price for the Primal Blueprint Expert Certification expires on Dec. 15. If you’ve been thinking about furthering your Primal knowledge and becoming certified I’d encourage you to do it today and save $200 off the final retail price.

Heads up for Portland, OR area readers. Brad Kearns is coming to town to deliver the Primal Transformation Seminar on Thursday, Jan 29th, 2015 at VC CrossFit. Get your tickets now!

Fans of Katy Bowman (and heck, people who have no idea who she is but enjoy walking and moving well): this month, Katy is posting daily tidbits about improving your walking, posture, and biomechanics. These are tips you can incorporate throughout the day and they only take a few minutes to read, so check out her 24-Day Walking Advent Calendar.

Research of the Week

Restricted eating windows (9-12 hours long) help prevent metabolic damage from unhealthy diets, even when weekends are free-for-alls.

Train passengers instructed to speak to total strangers instead of ignore them were happier, even if they were introverts and usually preferred keeping to themselves in similar situations.

A new “hug” brain test designed to test emotional processing of “emotion-laden actions” is meant for autism diagnoses, but I bet it could also be used to ferret out android replicants in the near future.

New Primal Blueprint Podcasts

Episode 45: Interview with Rich Wilson, Vendeé Globe Skipper: In 2009, Rich Wilson was the oldest (age 58) of 11 finishers to complete the Vendeé Globe, a 28,000 mile solo yacht race around the world. To prepare for his second attempt, Rich is embracing the Primal Blueprint and in today’s episode we talk all about it.

Each week, select Mark’s Daily Apple blog posts are prepared as Primal Blueprint Podcasts. Need to catch up on reading, but don’t have the time? Prefer to listen to articles while on the go? Check out the new blog post podcasts below, and subscribe to the Primal Blueprint Podcast here so you never miss an episode.

Should You Eat Periodic “Cheat” Meals?
How to Leverage the Minimum Effective Dose in Your Primal Life
What it Means to Be Thankful for Your Health
The Definitive Guide to Insulin, Blood Sugar, and Type 2 Diabetes

Interesting Blog Posts

How important was inter-group conflict in determining human brain evolution?

Marvel’s Fiber Man Meets Microbial Man is slated for a 2016 release (with a post-Avengers credits teaser that takes place in a porta potty).

Media, Schmedia

A therapist tries the average middle schooler’s daily routine — sitting at a desk for six hours and paying close attention in class — and can’t handle it. Quick, get her a prescription for Adderall!

Willie Murphy, a 77-year old grandmother, deadlifts 215 pounds, does 1 handed pushups, and probably gives the best hugs.

Everything Else

In Denmark, hygge is a pervasive feeling of cozy togetherness, like how Americans might feel at Thanksgiving dinner. Is that why the Danes are so dang happy all the time?

Instead of playing “Which industrial toxin is safest to use on children’s playgrounds?” I propose that we just let kids play in the dirt.

23andMe, the personal genomics service that’s been severely curtailed by the FDA, is coming to the UK.

That’s certainly something.

Did anthropologists just find the earliest evidence of human creativity — engravings on a shell dated 500,000 years ago — made by Homo erectus?

Birds really are terrible monsters.

Recipe Corner

Highly nutrient-dense, highly delicious stuffed mushrooms.
This barbacoa handily beats Chipotle’s soy oil-laden stuff any day of the week.

Time Capsule

One year ago (Dec 7 – Dec 13)

Do You Use Food as a Crutch? – How to enjoy food without letting it control us.
Dear Mark: Full-Fat Dairy Roundup – Answers to your questions about the place of full-fat dairy in our diets.

Comment of the Week

I implement this by not moving unless I absolutely have to, in all other circumstances I stay perfectly still, just breathing gently.

– Not quite what I had in mind, but if it works for you, who’s to say?

You CAN Lose Weight and Get Healthy. Find Out How>>

Dark Chocolate and Citrus Macadamia Balls

If you’re someone who can’t resist licking cookie dough from the beaters (maybe, you even like cookie dough better than cookies) then here’s a discovery you should know about: macadamia nuts, when blended until smooth but not quite all the way into macadamia butter, taste deliciously close to cookie dough.

Macadamia “dough” has a soft, gooey texture and naturally sweet, buttery flavor that’s the perfect base for raw desserts. It can be rolled and shaped and then flavored with anything that satisfies your sweet tooth. In this recipe, orange zest and dark chocolate are a festive combination, appropriate for the holidays or any time of year.

As far as nuts go, it doesn’t get much better than a macadamia nut. Minimal linoleic acid and decent amounts of magnesium, manganese, thiamine, copper, and iron, make macadamia nuts the perfect snack…in reasonable amounts. Worried you’ll scarf down a dozen of these dark chocolate & citrus macadamia balls in one sitting? Plan to bring them to a party instead of hoarding them all to yourself, and you’ll be lucky to get even one.

Servings: 12 balls

Time in the Kitchen: 15 minutes

Ingredients:

1 ½ cups raw, unsalted macadamia nuts (225 g)
A pinch of salt
¾ cup dark chocolate chips (or about 3 ounces dark chocolate, finely chopped) (90 g)
Zest of 1 orange

Instructions:

Blend the macadamia nuts and salt in a food processor just until the nuts are smooth and have the consistency of dough. Stop processing before the nuts take on a looser, butter-like texture.

Set the macadamia dough aside and wipe the food processor out. Blend the chocolate chips until they are broken into tiny pieces, similar to chocolate sprinkles.

Shape the macadamia dough into balls. If the dough isn’t holding its shape, refrigerate it for 30 minutes first.

Roll each ball in orange zest, then chocolate. Store in the refrigerator.

Recipes notes:

For more flavor throughout, use your hands to blend some of the chocolate and orange zest into the macadamia butter before rolling it into balls.

If the macadamia balls are going to be served at a party, put them in the freezer for an hour or so beforehand. This helps the balls stay firm longer when set out at room temperature.

Not Sure What to Eat? Get the Primal Blueprint Meal Plan for Shopping Lists and Recipes Delivered Directly to Your Inbox Each Week

How I Reclaimed My Body and Health with Primal Living

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!

My initial interest in Mark’s Primal Blueprint was, I’ll admit, primarily driven by aesthetics. I wanted to improve my physical appearance. During my teens and early 20´s I´d been super fit, but those days were long gone. At 38, I didn’t enjoy looking at a middle aged overweight guy in the mirror. The image was accompanied by thoughts of how I use to be. I wanted to get back my youthful physique. It’s not that I wasn’t concerned about my health. It’s just that other than getting fatter and less fit, I hadn’t suffered any acute illness. Sure I was heading for a higher risk of coronary heart disease, cancer, diabetes and stroke, but I hadn’t had any signs or symptoms yet. I wasn’t a smoker or a frequent, heavy drinker. I´d kept away from fatty foods and ate plenty of whole grains so I must be healthy, right? Wrong!

After a short search online, I found Mark’s Daily Apple. I took heed of his teachings and set about trying to change my body composition through primal eating. I followed the instructions and changed my sugar rich diet into a low carb, high fat one. I threw my fears about saturated fats and cholesterol to the wind and embraced the concept best I could. I wanted to avoid getting too technical about what I was eating, so I just focused on eating plants and animals—or, in other words, real food with real flavour. I found that pretty easy. I really like vegetables, meats and fish anyway, so it was instantly a pleasure to begin eating the tastier foods. For my entire adult life I´d been scared of fat and now I was finding that the fat was sometimes the most delicious part of the meal!

It’s what happened next though that really changed my perception on the human diet and how dramatically wrong accepted “wisdom” is on the subject. Sure I lost my excess body weight, no problem at all. I got that physique I´d been missing. But there was something else—something of far greater value…

For the fat loss, it was surprisingly easy. There was no calorie counting, no food weighing, and no periods of hunger. From MDA and The Primal Blueprint, I gained an understanding of what different foods are and what they do to us. The education helped me choose foods with confidence and knowledge. I ate lots of delicious foods. I was never hungry. I barely exercised, yet I lost 1 kg of body weight consistently over a period of 12 weeks. I had to go and buy new clothes because none of mine fit any more—even my feet shrank by a shoe size. All that was great and the lower body weight meant I could finally manage the elusive handstand push-up (albeit against a wall). I was very pleased with the results. But what I hadn’t realised was how, despite no symptoms of illness, I suddenly felt 100 times healthier than before the change of food choices. I was more alert. I had higher levels of energy. I was happier and less stressed. It was a dramatic change and something I had not been expecting.

After a week I suddenly found out how bloated my gut had been. During the first couple of days, my digestive system started to function much better. I suppose it was the change from stodgy carb foods blocking up the gut to highly nutritious, easily absorbed foods passing through more easily. From a biomechanical perspective, the good food “passed though” much more effectively after I kicked out the bad food. I felt light on my feet, smaller around the waist and, well, internally, I felt cleared out. It was quite a liberating sensation and very encouraging. I could innately sense this was a good development.

In week two, I saw improvements in my skin and continued to see digestive system improvement. But I was starting to feel less energetic and at times even a little nauseous. I was having doubts and wondering if what I was doing was actually a good idea. Despite that, I wanted to see it through to the end of the 21 Day Total Body Transformation Challenge, so I kept going regardless.

Week three: Well, what a difference. My body was feeling great. My cognitive processes had improved. I was enjoying much clearer thought, better levels of concentration and better sleep. I know it sounds a little crazy but it was like I was coming out from a cloud and I could now see much more clearly. The changes were so dramatic that it became a little difficult to keep it to myself. I wanted to tell everyone. There was a danger of becoming fanatical about it. It was from the shock of suddenly realising how wrong something was and having a desire to help wake others up to reality. My wife could see the results and decided to join me. We both noticed huge improvements, including fat loss, but that really had become the lesser benefit by that point. It was great to make this change with my partner. The whole experience became a shared one, which of course made shopping for foods and cooking much more fun.

Cheat meals. From time to time we have both decided to treat ourselves to a cheat meal—something non-primal. Sometimes it was a food we felt we missed or, through bad planning, one for which we had no better options available at the time. The funny thing was that our “treat” quickly became less pleasant than we anticipated. Each time the reality of a cheat meal or treat was a disappointment. Worse still, and more worryingly, these cheats were usually followed by some kind of physical reaction. Eating foods that contained wheat, for example, would be followed by the appearance of painful spots or boils by the next morning. Sometimes we´d have heavy sensations in our guts and sometimes constipation. That was very worrying and we realised: if that’s the result of a small exposure, what was the effect of a lifetime of carbs and grains as staple foods doing to us? Food for thought indeed.

Well, it’s been months now and neither I nor my lovely wife has any intention of going back to eating grains or high carb diets. The fad diet is over and now we only intend to eat foods that are suitable for human consumption, guided by Mark and our ancient ancestors.

Of course Mark’s Primal Blueprint is not all about food or exercise—it’s a blueprint for living. I’m continuing to change my lifestyle beyond food and exercise, but I have a way to go. I still work too much and don’t manage enough play with my family, but when I am home we certainly do much more now than ever before—whether it’s time at the beach, playing basketball, playing in the park, at home or even skateboarding. I know my body is back to being youthful again and so it is again functional for play. This is a great way of life and I will continue to develop it with my wife, children and friends. I do and always will encourage anyone to consider this lifestyle change.

I find this “Primal” movement very exciting and I’m deeply interested to see where it takes us all. It’s just such a surprise to me that we´ve gotten this far with so little knowledge about what we eat and the effect foods have on us until now. Thank you, Mark. Thanks for sharing what you have learned.

Ronnie

You CAN Lose Weight and Get Healthy. Find Out How>>

Examining the Concept of Self-Care

Once in the midst of a dinner party conversation while I was describing my work, a smart and eccentric woman interjected with a thought I’ve considered ever since. “Exercise, good eating, lots of sleep – those are what keep me healthy. Self-care, on the other hand…” she explained leaning forward smiling and stabbing the air with her fork, “That’s what keeps me sane.” There were some laughs and several enthusiastic nods around the table. I understood in a general sense what she meant, but the concept got me thinking. What exactly is “self-care”? Beyond the requisite showers, teeth-brushing and nail-clipping, beyond the eating well, exercising, sleeping and sunning, what does this mean? Naps? Facials? As I’ve considered the idea over time, I’ve come to see it in less precious and gendered terms than I think is common. Ultimately, I’ve come to believe that self-care puts a name and value to self-attunement in action.

I think we all have known people who do everything they “should” and yet end up a frazzled mess. They may practice all the pieces, so to speak. They go to the gym 4-5 times a week. They eat a worthy diet – even by Primal standards. They go to bed by 10:30 every night and try to “manage” their stress. Yet, somehow they’ve missed something fundamental along the way. The sum of the parts ends up less than whole.

Even when we consider the added elements of The Primal Connection – the time in nature, the effort to do something creative, the prioritization of social relationships, the center isn’t quite there. I think the Habits of Highly Successful Hunter-Gatherers ventured the outlines of this idea, but perhaps there’s more to it still.

The fact is, science (and anthropology) inform us about what activities can serve our health, but the nuance of self – when we’re in tune with this – puts it together in a way that ultimately serves our individual well-being – based as it is on our particular temperaments and personalities (factors that have both psychological and physiological roots). This is what keeps vitality more than the product of a simple formula. Flourishing doesn’t just come from the sum of recommended dosages of anything – no matter how healthy, well thought out or extensive.

Instead, we find the deepest manifestation of vitality where health and self-care merge – at the back roads intersection of genuine self-knowledge and responsive self-investment. This can happen with the rare and revolutionary act of knowing yourself (and accepting that self) and letting this understanding determine not just your goals but much of your daily life.

Sounds subversive – yes, it can be. The difference is you’re not trying to run the world or anyone else in it – just yourself, which can be a bigger challenge than most people will ever be able to master in their lifetimes.

Truth be told, we can’t always control our circumstances, but we can continually gauge where we’re at physically and emotionally and choose to respond effectively – which means being genuinely aligned with our needs and intentions. Taking care of ourselves is more than hygiene and health. If you can humor me for a minute, understand that I’m not talking about devoting ourselves to navel-gazing or placating anyone’s narcissistic tendencies.

I’m talking about equanimity. How, for instance, do we take care of our emotions in a day? Do we know how to handle them, or do we let them spill out and become other people’s problems? How do we take care of and steward our energy? Do we apply it thoughtfully or chronically give it away unnecessarily or unwisely and end each day totally spent? How does this serve our long-term vitality or experience of this life?

There’s a personal balance based not on time management or multi-tasking but on inputs and outputs (what feeds us versus depletes us) that we can develop over time. The attention to this balance and the choices that exist in alignment with it constitute self-care.

Inherent to this self-commitment (no one can do this for us, by the way) is the release of every excuse. We can have needs. We can make mistakes and choose to redirect. We can tune into the physical and emotional stress that build up in the face of circumstances we don’t get to choose. But we cannot have excuses and simultaneously live this kind of self-commitment.

The blueprint model of the Primal Blueprint leaves room for this. In fact, I think it requires it to some degree. I’ve always said the Primal Blueprint lays out principles but leaves the particular execution and variation to each individual. What is heaven for one person is hell for another, yet we can all live a good Primal life. Whether we’d file it under play or healthy indulgence or self-development or personal exploration, I’d say self-care is another dimension of the “optional” not really being optional.

There are a thousand different choices that will nourish each of us under the umbrella of self-care, which is as much a male phenomenon as it is a female one. For some, it means puttering around, hiding out in the garage working on a hobby. For others, it means taking a personal retreat away from everyone and everything or practicing a simple ritual before bed even if it’s just filing our nails and reading for ten minutes. Maybe it’s meditating or running. Maybe it’s a raucous night out. It could mean five minutes of total quiet in a dark room or the enjoyment of human touch during a massage or a hug. It could mean finding ways to laugh every day or working in a long hot shower at night. Sometimes it’s just leaving the office for that fifteen minute break to go put your face toward the sun or to sit in your car – the closest thing to truly private space some of us have for the majority of our days. Maybe it’s a half-day off on a rainy day, a good book or a certain meal or a hot rice sock around our neck while we lay on the couch after a long day. It’s flowers on our nightstand or favorite music in the morning. It’s walking the dog or sharing an hour with a good friend – sometimes talking, sometimes working on a project and other times just being in the same room watching a game. In the midst of a work day, maybe it’s taking five minutes to decompress from a meeting, choosing to not absorb the stress of the people around you – or to release it if you already have. It’s not always about what you do but choosing to do it differently.

Over time we all develop our own bag of tricks, and the list becomes very personal. The choices not only fit ourselves but our stages in life and current circumstances. Someone going through a crisis might fill this well very differently than he/she would’ve just a few months earlier. When we commit to self-care, we begin to intuit what that means for us. What do we really need in a day? It can be a transformative question.

More than anything, self-care as I see it is less than a list of behaviors and more a mindset that you’re going to do what serves you rather than what upholds the typical routine and others’ infinite expectations. If that sounds selfish, I’d offer you the seeming irony that when we let go of the obligation to react to others’ expectations, we can actually be more present to their needs as well as our own. We’re off the manic carousel and standing on solid ground. It’s a much better vantage point from which to perceive, act and relate in life. When we take care of ourselves we slough off less stress and projection onto other people. The impact is easy to underestimate.

With the holiday season underway, maybe it’s as good a time as any to think about what self-attunement in action means to us individually. What do we need space for in our lives today to feel vital and rested? Let me know your thoughts on this.

Thanks for reading today, everyone. Have a great end to your week.

Should You Eat Periodic “Cheat” Meals?

I get a lot of questions about cheat meals. Are they allowed on the Primal Blueprint? Is there a reason someone should actively seek to eat unhealthy food from time to time? The allure of the cheat meal is obvious: you get to eat stuff that’s otherwise off-limits and extremely delicious. You get to throw caution to the wind for a night. It’s like vacation and you’re a food tourist. But are there actual benefits? Today, we’ll take a look.

As I see it, there are three arguments to be made for including periodic — that is, scheduled or preordained — cheat meals in your otherwise solid Primal eating plan.

The Psychological Deload

Some people can stick to their strict diets with metronomic regularity. They have no issues avoiding “those foods” and feel zero compulsion to cheat. That’s me, for the most part. I’ll pick at the odd crusty piece of bread with butter in a restaurant or birthday cake offered to me, but I’ll just as often decline to partake. But not everyone is like that.

For some folks, hewing to the Primal eating plan takes willpower. It’s not so much that you’re constantly fighting off temptation. It’s that sometimes a burger sounds awesome. Sometimes your buddies want to go out for beers and wings or cosmos and gyoza (yep, those are my gender-biased happy hour corollaries and I’m sticking to them) and you’d like to join them. The cheat meal is a great way to take the load off, let loose, and maintain your sanity. It can ensure dietary compliance and there’s even recent evidence that it may make your diet more effective:

Women were placed on a cyclic diet consisting of three phases. For each phase, they reduced calories for 11 days followed by 3 days of ad libitum (i.e. at one’s pleasure) eating. After the three phases, they’d lost an average of 8 kg (about 17 lbs) of pure body fat. This surpassed the amount predicted by calories in, calories out. This study didn’t employ all-out cheat days, but the concept is similar.

The cheat meal is like the deload week in strength training in that it helps the people who need it replenish their will to stay the course and comply with the diet. It’s a break from the monotony, the ardor, the hard work — whatever you want to call it and however you perceive it. It’s like the 80/20 principle, only planned, and it works for the same reasons I included that in the Primal Blueprint.

Just, ya know, don’t take the deload week analogy too literally and make your cheat meal a full-on cheat week.

The Hormetic Effect

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of hormesis, it’s simple: what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Acute stressors beget resistance to that stressor. Think Wesley in The Princess Bride slowly building up his resistance to iocane powder with gradually increasing microdoses of the poison until he could handle a dose that would kill another man several times over. That was hormesis. Hormesis explains why plant phytonutrients – which are actually just toxins employed by the plant for its defense against pests – exercise, fasting, and even occasional sleep deprivation can be good for us. They all introduce an acute bout of stress that our bodies must fortify themselves against. In the process of fortification, we become stronger, healthier, and more robust.

Okay. A tough workout, some blueberries, a skipped meal or two are one thing. But could a meal of oxidized lipids (heated seed oils) and heat-derived carcinogens (well done meat and fried potatoes) really have beneficial hormetic effects? Maybe.

4-hydroxy-2-nonenal (4-HNE) is a lipid peroxidation toxin spawned by the interaction between reactive oxygen species and omega-6 PUFAs in the body. Large concentrations of 4-HNE and other similar toxins are responsible for tissue damage stemming from ischemic heart attacks, but low concentrations of 4-HNE activate NrF2, the same resistance pathway activated by phytonutrients like blueberry anthocyanin. In the right dose, 4-HNE actually primed cardiac cells to develop resistance against the damaging effects of 4-HNE and increased glutathione synthesis. Mice without the NrF2 gene did not benefit from 4-HNE, showing that hormesis was the lynchpin.

How about carcinogens like the heterocyclic amines formed in smoked, well-done, and processed meats? A team of Japanese researchers studying the effects of low and high-dose carcinogens thinks that “adaptations may be expected to occur in response to low doses of all types of DNA-damaging agents.” (PDF) There’s even some evidence that certain mycotoxins have hormetic effects at low levels in rodent ovarian cells, but that’s not sufficient reason to go out and knowingly consume moldy corn or anything crazy like that.

I’d guess that the hormetic principle applies to many toxins. Well, maybe except for acrylamide. That’s a carcinogen formed during the heating of starches (think French fries) which does not appear to stimulate the hormetic pathway enough to confer beneficial effects.

We don’t have enough to make any prescriptions (things like “a small order of fries will up regulate resistance to cardiac damage while a large order will increase susceptibility”) and I’m not even sure the hormetic principle applies to general cheat meals, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

The Metabolism Kickstart

Protracted calorie restriction in the pursuit of weight loss, whether deliberate (weighing, measuring, counting) or spontaneous (low-carb, focus on nutrient density to promote satiety), can depress metabolic rate and stall weight loss. It is known.

A cheat meal can kickstart the metabolism and keep the weight loss going, not despite the massive influx of calories but because of it. When you eat a big meal, a few good things happen:

Leptin increases. Leptin is a hormone that interacts with the hypothalamus to suppress food intake and increase energy expenditure. It’s reduced by low levels of body fat (body fat actually secretes leptin) and prolonged caloric restriction. So if you’ve lost body fat in the past, stalled, and further reduced food intake to bust the plateau, you’re doing a double whammy on leptin. A big meal, especially if it’s high in carbs and even if it’s a cheat meal, can restore leptin levels so that weight loss can resume.

Thyroid hormone increases. T3, the “active” thyroid hormone, is generally lowered during prolonged calorie restriction. This is normal, and as long as your energy levels are good and weight loss is maintained, a nominally depressed T3 is physiological and expected and nothing to fret over. But extended calorie restriction accompanied by fatigue, malaise, and weight plateaus or gain is a sign of too low a T3. That’s where an acute bout of overfeeding — a cheat meal — can help by restoring your thyroid function to physiological levels.

Glycogen refills. If you’re coming off a low-carb diet, a cheat meal full of carbs can restock your glycogen stores and make subsequent high-intensity, anaerobically-demanding fitness pursuits more fruitful.

Before you jump into a regimented cheat meal, keep a few things in mind:

Cheating is relative.

Cheating can be “healthy.” You don’t have to gorge on Hostess cupcakes, McDonald’s fries, and Totino’s Party Pizza for it to be a cheat meal. Maybe you cheat with a ridiculous amount of fresh strawberries in whipped cream and melted dark chocolate. Maybe you cheat with a pound of mashed purple sweet potatoes mixed with cinnamon and coconut oil. Maybe you cheat with a huge batch of homemade fries. Those are all examples of wholesome high-carb meals resembling (and often surpassing in taste) common junk foods that could provide a kickstart to your metabolic rate.

Cheating isn’t cheating if you’re not in a committed relationship with a clean, wholesome diet.

You have to have something to “cheat on.” If you’re already eating fast food five times a week, that cheat meal isn’t a cheat meal anymore. It’s just how you eat. And don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re cheating yourself with that fettucine alfredo. You’re not cheating yourself. You’re not “failing.” You’re just making an informed choice to partake of food that, if consumed chronically, would probably elicit unfavorable metabolic effects.

Try to keep something healthy in there.

Have a spinach salad alongside the gluten-free pizza. Eat a few eggs with your waffles. Going for a burger with bun? Spring for the buffalo burger and make it gluten-free. If you’re going for grains and sugar, avoid seed oils. If you’re gonna get French fries, skip dessert. Get a good whack of protein, too, and avoid gluten, especially if you’re celiac or gluten-sensitive.

If you’re stuck on a weight loss plateau and want off, a cheat meal once a week or so might help. If you feel hemmed in on all sides by too much dietary purity, a cheat meal could even be a good idea. If you wind up hungover just because you tried one of your friend’s French fries last night, a regular cheat meal might be able to cultivate more robustness.

But they aren’t necessary. Don’t think just because you read this on MDA that you “have to have a cheat meal.” It’s just a suggestion. Only do it if it makes sense and helps you stick to an overall healthy, enjoyable way of eating and living.

Let’s hear from you guys. Do you use cheat meals regularly? Have they helped?

You CAN Lose Weight and Get Healthy. Find Out How>>

How to Leverage the Minimum Effective Dose in Your Primal Life

If you haven’t heard about the minimum effective dose, a concept coined by Nautilus fitness creator Arthur Jones and popularized by lifestyle hacker Tim Ferriss in his book The Four Hour Body, here’s the simplest definition: the smallest dose that will produce the desired effect or outcome. For Jones, this was the minimum effective load, the point after which any additional resistance added to the bar would be redundant or even counterproductive to one’s strength and fitness goals. For Ferriss, the MED is about getting the most bang for your exercise and dietary buck.

A popular example is boiling water. If you want to boil a pot of water at standard air pressure, the MED is 212° F (100° C). Adding more heat is redundant and won’t make it “boil even more.”

If you looked closely, the Primal Blueprint has always been about getting the best results for the least amount of pain, sacrifice, time, work, and suffering. It started as a reaction to my prior life as an endurance athlete, where I did the exact opposite: I got decent results for a massive amount of pain, sacrifice, time, work, and suffering. And back at PrimalCon Oxnard in September of this year, my keynote speech was about leveraging the minimum effective dose in various aspects of your Primal lifestyle to get the most benefits with the least amount of sacrifice. The MED isn’t a prescription; it’s a lens for examining our life and determining how to allocate our time and effort. And though it can probably be quantified using extensive tracking, biometrics, weighing, and measuring, that isn’t necessary, or even ideal.

Okay, so how does this apply to Primal living?

Calorie Intake

My old college buddies still call me Arnold (after the pig from Green Acres) because I ate so much, more than even the football players. I was a naturally skinny 19 year-old with a cremator for a metabolism who ran long distances daily, and I prided myself on being able to eat as much food as I could without gaining an ounce. It was a game, almost: how much food could I eat without gaining body fat?

These days, I take a different approach:

What’s the least amount of food (that’s the dose) I can eat without losing muscle, reducing performance, tanking energy, and going hungry (those are my desired outcomes)?

I’m not starving. It’s not suffering, or going without, or gritting my teeth and powering through. If my sleep were to suffer, my performance in the gym were to drop, my muscle mass were to diminish, I’d know that I was undershooting the MED. If I was constantly getting ravenously hungry, I’d know to eat more. I’ve simply figured out my minimum effective dose for food.

Nowadays, you hear a lot of warnings about dieting in general, or restricting anything in your diet (whether calories or carbs or whatever else). “It’ll ruin your metabolism!” they say. “You’ll gain weight,” they warn. And there’s something to that — I’ve explored the plateau-busting benefits of a well-planned carb overfeed — but a consistent overabundance of incoming food is a major reason people have trouble with weight. Figuring out your caloric MED can help abolish these troubles.

I’m not suggesting you count calories and weigh and measure everything you eat. Instead, prioritize calorie-sparse, nutrient-dense foods that satisfy hunger and promote satiety, like organ meats, eggs, leafy greens, fish and shellfish. Limit or outright avoid calorie-dense, nutrient-sparse foods that increase hunger and reduce satiety, like refined grains, seed/vegetable oils, sugar, and processed junk food.

I’ve got the perfect example. Say you’re looking to increase your magnesium intake and hit the daily requirements. You can get your daily magnesium from 2.5 cups of soybeans, which is about 900 calories, or you could steam a 16 ounce package of frozen organic spinach, which is just 140 calories. Notice the difference?

It’s also often just a matter of setting down the fork, leaving a little on your plate, and pushing back from the table filled with all that delicious Primal food. I’m reminded of Louis C.K.’s great bit on his eating habits:

I don’t stop eating when I’m full. The meal isn’t over when I’m full. It’s over when I hate myself.

Don’t do that. It’s hilarious because it rings true for a lot of people, but it’s not a model of eating behavior we’re meant to aspire toward. How much food do you really need?

Exercise

There’s a point at which exercising more isn’t going to get you any closer to your goal, whether that’s to get faster, stronger, or bigger. I saw this in the endurance world especially, where squeezing those last few miles in was always a Good Thing. For many years, I lived by that credo. Every mile helped. Every extra hour spent on the bike made me that much stronger, faster, fitter, and healthier. I “knew” this because I was improving. My improvement appeared to be linear, and I figured it would continue to progress as long as I pushed the envelope.

It was sneakier than that. Because while that brutal training regimen may very well improve your performance in the gym or on the field, it slowly destroys your health, takes away your free time, and invades every other aspect of your life. Is that worth it?

If your goal is to beat the other guy or your own PR at any cost, it’s worth it. If your goal is to be generally fit, lean, happy, and healthy, you just left your minimum effective dose in the dust.

Don’t fall into that trap. It doesn’t work in the long run and I’m glad to have escaped it. Just because some is good doesn’t mean more is better.

The latest exercise science affirms the effectiveness of the minimum effective dose paradigm, particularly when it comes to endurance training. Cardio for health? The assumed health benefits of spending inordinately long periods of time subjecting your body to abject misery are dissipating. Sprints and high intensity interval training get you most of the same benefits — plus some extras — in a fraction of the time it takes to run and bike long distances.

By and large, even the top athletes are figuring out they can train less, if they train smarter. They’re resting more than ever, incorporating strength training instead of exclusively pounding the pavement, and they’ve learned the value of making their hard workouts harder and shorter and their easy workouts easier and longer.

Sun Exposure

The sun feels great on your skin, doesn’t it? That it offers health benefits like increased vitamin D and nitric oxide production is another reason to get sun. But there’s a point where vitamin D production stops and skin damage sets in, where your skin blisters and the vitamin D formed by your body must be diverted away from general health promotion, bone health, and sex hormone production toward protecting your skin. That point is the minimum effective dose of UV.

Hovering around the MED for sun will also give you freedom in addition to vitamin D. If you’re nursing a bad sunburn, you’ll have to stay out of the direct sun for a week or two. If you stuck to the MED, you can go back out the very next day and enjoy the weather.

Your MED for sun exposure will depend on several variables:

Skin color – The darker your skin, the more time in the sun you’ll require for optimal vitamin D production and the longer you can stay before incurring damage. For a light skinned person, 15 minutes of midday spring/summer sun might be sufficient. For a dark skinned person, it might be an hour.

Diet – Nutrition affects skin vulnerability. Omega-3s, saturated fats, antioxidant-rich anti-inflammatory plants (tea, tomatoes, berries), spices, and animals (salmon, shrimp) all affect it positively, while inflammatory seed oils high in omega-6 fats affect it negatively.

Sleep – Skin resistance to sun damage follows a circadian rhythm, and bad sleep leaves you susceptible to UV rays.

Whatever your situation, a sun MED exists. The point is to discover and hew to it.

Glucose Intake

Carbs are a mostly elective source of calories that can be very beneficial in the right dose when divvied out according to training volume, performance goals, and individual variation in tolerance/desire. But the right dose is very important. If you are the daily metcon type, you should probably eat more carbs to the tune of 100 extra grams per hour of anaerobic output. Those carbs will replenish your glycogen — they’ll be put to good use. If you’re just doing lots of walking, lifting once or twice a week, and throwing in a sprint session every now and then, you should probably stay underneath the curve. Make sure your physical activity warrants carb-loading before you carb-load.

As is illustrated in the Primal Carbohydrate Curve, no one needs more than 150 grams of starchy carbohydrate unless they’re regularly engaging in lots of anaerobic activity (think HIIT, sprints, heavy lifting, mid-to-high intensity endurance training, sports like soccer, basketball, football, daily CrossFit-esque metcons).

Play around with carb intake. See how few you need to support your training on subsequent days. Maybe 150 grams today isn’t quite enough for your morning workout tomorrow, but 200 grams is plenty. Find your sweet spot that supports performance, and stick to bottom range of it.

Productivity

When I write, I can’t handle long protracted bouts. They just don’t work for me. Say I tell myself, “Okay, Sisson, you’ve got until five o’clock. That’s eight unbroken hours of pure writing time.” I envision an entire post completed. I imagine that chapter finally finished. But in reality, I end up squandering most of those eight hours because, hey, I’ve got all the time in the world!

Smaller doses work better for me. I’ll write for a half hour, then take a five minute break to hop on the slackline or play with the dog. Half hour blocks work because a half hour isn’t negotiable. You only have 30 minutes. Then it’s over, and you get a small reward and the satisfaction of a solid page or two of completed text. In my case, the minimum effective dose of writing is usually 30 minutes (give or take).

Finding your MED for work productivity is hard because it’s always changing. One day, you might be productive straight through for six hours. Another day, you can only go for an hour. That’s fine. You just have to pay attention to what’s working. If you find yourself frittering time away and clock watching and stressing about the work not being done, it’d probably be more effective to go do something else. Anything else – a few supersets of squats and pushups, a coffee break, a short walk around the office/block? As it stands now, you’re just wasting everyone’s time.

Starting to get the point?  Many aspects of life, health, and fitness can be viewed — and maybe optimized — through the lens of the minimum effective dose.

Take caffeine intake. Smaller, more frequent doses of 20-200 mg per hour (the average cup of coffee contains between 100 and 150 mg of caffeine) appear to work better than megadoses. Anything more than that and the benefits plateau while the negative effects (on sleep, for one) grow prominent.

Or soap. As I wrote in the last couple skin biome posts, sudsing up has its consequences. Excessive washing removes natural oils and your protective skin bacteria, drying you out and leaving you open for colonization by pathogens. Where’s the minimum effective dose here? You don’t want to smell or look like Pigpen from the Peanuts, but you want naturally moisturized skin and a healthy, diverse skin biome.

What else? Play around with it and let us know what you think. Thanks for reading, everyone. Have a great Tuesday.