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Dear Mark: Am I Eating Too Little Food or Too Much Iron?

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, we’ve got a two-parter. First, Mathilde wonders whether she’s eating too little food. A high-fat, nutrient-dense Primal way of eating can have the effect of maximal satiation on fewer calories, and that’s usually fine, but there are instances where too few calories can have negative health effects. I tell her what symptoms to watch out for. After that, I discuss the issue of too much iron in the diet. It may be a concern for people with genetic tendencies to store excessive amount of iron, but what about regular people without those genetic variants?

Let’s go:

Dear Mark,

I will be as brief as possible I know we shouldn’t count calories when eating primal/paleo, but when I’m eating this way, I find myself not managing to eat more then 1000 maybe 1100 calories and that is by adding coconut and olive oil to my meals. Is so little calorie intake just fine if I’m not more hungry or will it spoil my effort by putting my body in a kind of “common restriction diet state”?

Thank you so much for all your eye opening information!

Best regards,

Mathilde

For the most part, I see the inadvertent reduction in calorie intake as a good thing. A feature of a nutrient-dense, satiating Primal way of eating. Many of us, particularly if we have excess fat to lose, are consuming more food than we require. It can go the other way, though. It can get messy and unpleasant and begin to have a negative effect on your health and quality of life.

Unfortunately, hunger isn’t always a reliable barometer to decide whether you’ve gone too low. During a calorie restricted diet, in fact, hunger doesn’t necessarily even increase, probably due to a reduced energy expenditure to match the reduced energy intake. If your body perceives the reduced calorie intake as the new normal, you’re not going to feel very hungry – even if you would be better served by more food. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course, and there’s some evidence that a slightly slower metabolism is optimal for longevity, but when you start seeing decidedly negative symptoms along with the reduction in hunger, it might herald a problem. After all, you want to enjoy your life, not live out a miserable, lengthy existence. Compression of morbidity, not extension, is what we want.

You might want to try eating more calories if:

You find yourself developing a newfound sensitivity to cold. Long term calorie restriction is a fantastic way to lower your core body temperature. Higher body temperatures act as a buffer against the elements; if your body temperature drops, you will be more sensitive to cold weather and you may perceive otherwise moderate temperatures as uncomfortably chilly.

Sex doesn’t interest you as much as it used to. In males, calorie restriction lowers testosterone, sexual impulses, and attraction to otherwise fetching females (albeit rodent females). Human calorie-restricted males also have lower testosterone. Since leptin lowers with calorie restriction, and libido is intimately tied to leptin levels, the same holds true for women as well. A loss of libido is a common side effect of chronic calorie restricters.

You never feel like doing anything. Since we need fuel to power our body to perform mental and physical tasks, under-eating can leave us listless.

You get dizzy when you stand up quickly. Calorie restriction is usually quite effective against hypertension, but if taken to the extreme it can lead to electrolyte imbalances/deficiencies and cause orthostatic hypotension, or postural hypotension. A common symptom is dizziness/head rushes upon standing.

Your performance in the gym is suffering. Interestingly enough, calorie restriction paired with resistance training prevents muscle atrophy (PDF), while calorie restriction paired with inactivity increases it. In other words, you gotta use it or lose it. Unfortunately, given the common side effect of not wanting to do anything at all, you might find it difficult to maintain a regular workout schedule.

Your wounds are taking longer to heal: Caloric restriction has been shown to impair collagen synthesis, which is how new skin forms as a wound heals.

You feel depressed (or worse). For a nice rundown on the possible psychological effects (including depression and suicidal thoughts) of super low-calorie intakes, check out this post by Dr. Emily Deans.

That last bit of belly fat just isn’t disappearing and even appears to be growing. Long term inadequate intake of food is, in essence, a major stressor on your body. It’s a mild form of starvation. And when your calories get too low, cortisol – one of the main stress hormones – goes up. Cortisol, as you probably know, is strongly associated with abdominal fat.

These are basically warning signs that your body is perceiving the chronically low calorie intake as a signal of famine. If none of this bothers you, or you find the tradeoffs to be worth the benefits, go ahead and keep going. But if the benefits aren’t worth it – or they’re increasingly nonexistent – you should probably eat more food. It’s a roundabout way of saying: do you feel good? If so, keep on keepin’ on.

Hi Mark,

My question is with regards to iron intake when eating Primal – I’m concerned I’m actually getting too much. After plugging my daily stats into Cronometer – I was constantly getting in excess of 500% my iron RDI, or close to 50mg/day. This was through eating very Primal friendly foods – red meat, and organs like hearts and liver (which seem to have the highest iron content of any foods).

So my question is, even though I’m pretty sure I don’t have haemochromatosis, is consuming this amount of iron on a daily basis safe? I’ve read that iron overload symptoms can be very similar to iron deficiency symptoms.

Mike

Should you worry? Well, iron is highly reactive. Its inherent proclivity for electron exchange can create free radicals that damage DNA, cells, and blood lipids. And observational studies linking iron intake and stored iron to diseases like type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer do exist. Heme iron, the most bioavailable type and the easiest to absorb, is found exclusively in animal sources. Meanwhile, humans don’t absorb non-heme iron, found in plant foods like spinach, raisins, dried apricots, and lentils, nearly as efficiently.

Assuming you don’t have hemochromatosis, however, iron shouldn’t pose a problem, as humans have built-in mechanisms that regulate iron absorption. If you have low iron stores, you will absorb more from your food. If you have elevated iron stores, you will absorb less. It fluctuates on an as-needed basis. In hemochromatosis, this regulation gets thrown out of whack, but it works well in most people – provided they’re getting sufficient amounts of dietary iron. Most people don’t need to worry about their iron intake.

So first off, get tested for hemochromatosis. According to Chris Kresser, even heterozygous carriers (with only one copy of the gene) may still have an elevated risk of several disease states (especially if you’re eating lots of iron). Your doctor may not be aware of this, as the conventional wisdom is that only homozygous carriers (two copies of the gene) are at risk for iron overload-related conditions. If you are a carrier, you may have to reduce iron intake (although one study found no consistent connection between iron intake and ferritin levels in homozygotes), get regular phlebotomies, and stay up to date with your iron panels. Getting an iron panel done is a good idea regardless.

Second, what exactly are you eating to hit 50 mg of iron a day? That’s a lot of iron. A pound of steak has around 10 mg, depending on which cut. Are you eating five pounds? Liver and other offal will get you there faster, but you shouldn’t be eating liver every day anyway because of the vitamin A content. Remember, each animal has but a single liver. Shellfish also run pretty high, especially clams. Unless you’re eating a chicken liver, lamb spleen, and pork lung stir-fry for dinner every other day, a clam smoothie for breakfast, and a five pound chuck roast for lunch on the other days, though, it’s gonna be hard to hit 50 mg.

However, there are other things to consider when considering the possible danger of iron:

The unhealthy user effect: Strangely, when you differentiate between the various sources of heme iron, research suggests that only heme iron from red meat is associated with type 2 diabetes. This means one of two things. Maybe something about heme iron from red meat is particularly lethal. Or maybe, because red meat is universally considered to be unhealthy, those people who care the least about their health and show it by smoking more, drinking more, exercising less, and so on are more likely to eat more red meat. Even though studies try to account for the unhealthy user effect by adjusting for variables like tobacco and alcohol, they can’t adjust for everything that unhealthy people do. For instance, if data on “time spent sitting” was never even gathered, the researchers couldn’t have adjusted for it – even though sitting is a big predictor of type 2 diabetes risk. I’d imagine people who eat the most red meat also sit the most, while folks who eat lentils and chicken and wild salmon tend to walk more.

Inflammation: Another study found no link between heme iron (and total iron, for that matter) and pancreatic cancer, except in female smokers. If that link is causal, it could indicate that dietary iron only becomes carcinogenic in the presence of inflammation (from smoking, in this instance). Other research has found that inflammation increases ferritin levels, suggesting that elevated iron could be an indication of disease rather than a cause of it.

Interaction between iron and other nutrients. You might be aware of the various interactions between dietary minerals. For example, manganese competes with iron for absorption. Dietary calcium also reduces iron absorption. If you’re eating plenty of other nutrient-dense foods along with your sources of iron, iron absorption will be modulated.

Does that mean you, a healthy Primal eater, are out of the woods? Not necessarily. The connections between excess iron and various diseases warrant caution, and 50 mg seems unnecessarily high to me. Here’s what I’d do:

First, establish your hemochromatosis status.

Second, get a full iron panel from your doctor or other health professional.

Third, don’t eat 50 mg of iron a day, particularly heme iron. How do you manage that, anyway? Heck, I’m not even mad. That’s amazing!

Fourth, eat from a diverse swathe of the plant and animal kingdom. Eat red meat, white meat, fish meat, shellfish meat, nut meat, and the fibrous flesh of leafy greens. This will help you get plenty of nutrients that normalize your iron absorption.

And finally, consider giving blood on a regular basis, especially if you’ve established that your ferritin levels are higher than you’d like. It’s highly likely that humans evolved to regularly endure small amounts of blood loss, whether through parasites or cuts, scrapes, and wounds, and this would have provided a way for men to shed excess iron and prevent overload. That could be why regular blood donation is associated with a lower risk for both heart disease and cancer. Donating blood is a good move anyway, without accounting for potential health benefits.

That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading and be sure to chime in with your thoughts, experiences, stories, and comments!

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Weekend Link Love

Research of the Week

Chopping wood boosts testosterone more than playing sports.

This news fills me with confidence: 9 out of 10 new drugs are no more (or even less) effective than their predecessors.

When smokers quit, they often gain weight, but not because of increased calorie intake. It’s the change in gut flora, according to new research.

Interesting Blog Posts

How the future of psychiatry may lie inside our guts.

Next time you run your dishwasher, stick a filet of salmon in there.

Media, Schmedia

A familiar science journalist wonders whether it’s too many calories or the wrong kind of calories that’s making us fatter. Or could it be both? (Subscription only.)

Now that these ten celebrities have gone paleo, you can too!

Everything Else

That’s one way to get people to sprint once in awhile.

It’s looking as if babies actually aren’t born sterile after all.

Food scientists have an ingenious idea to get rid of trans-fats: replace them with a novel food grade “oleogel” made of cellulosic polymer, surfactant, and vegetable oil. Or, you could just, I dunno, put the saturated fat back in that you were trying to replace in the first place.

Here’s what high heels do to your feet, in excruciatingly revealing detail.

Forget adaptations for consuming grains. This is the kind of evolutionary change I want to see!

Scientists are growing a miniature human brain in a lab somewhere. I must confess: it’s not as cute as other tiny versions of things.

Recipe Corner

A fun thing to do with meatza (like this sausage pesto meatza) is to introduce it as pizza when you serve it to people, then act surprised when they ask about the lack of crust.
You know what? Do the same routine with this basalmic beef bolognese with zucchini noodles.

Time Capsule

One year ago (Sept 1 – Sept 7)

How Common is Gluten Sensitivity? – Just because a person isn’t a full blown celiac doesn’t mean gluten is harmless. Learn how common such gluten sensitivity might be.
A Primal Primer: Candida – Is there really something to that mystery affliction to which some people attribute every symptom known to man? Find out.

Comment of the Week

It would be even more impressive if it was nighttime, and Mark was reading Hemingway on the paddleboard with sunglasses.

- That’s somewhat impressive, sure, but I’ve been known to read Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake on my paddleboard while wearing the blast shield helmet from Star Wars during a lunar eclipse.

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Parchment Baked Halibut with Parsley-Spinach Pesto

Parchment pockets are an easy way to simultaneously cook moist and tender fish, lightly steam veggies, and cut down on the amount of clean up after dinner. You don’t even need plates; just eat right out of the parchment.

With simple cooking methods, however, can come simple flavors. Which is why this parchment-baked halibut is topped with a zinging parsley-spinach pesto. This bold, nutrient-rich pesto is also a delicious way to eat your leafy greens. If you’re not in love with leafy greens in their natural state, or greens don’t show up often enough on your (or on your kid’s) plate, then pesto is the perfect place to hide them.

Spinach is one of the best greens to add to pesto because it hardly changes the flavor at all. Blanching the spinach ups the amount of iron you’ll absorb and also helps keep the color of pesto greener, longer. However, a handful of raw spinach easily blends into pesto as well. So go ahead – whether it’s this refreshing dairy-free parsley pesto or a traditional basil pesto – throw in a handful of greens, even if you have to do it on the sly.

When noodles aren’t in the picture, what else does pesto taste great on? Halibut, for one, and almost all types of other seafood, plus eggs, roasted vegetables, pork, steak, and Primal crackers.

Servings: 2 (with leftover pesto)

Time in the Kitchen: 45 minutes

Ingredients:

2 6-ounce halibut fillets (or other white fish) (170 g)
1 to 2 bell peppers, cut into thin slices or matchsticks
1 to 2 small yellow squash, cut into thin slices or matchsticks
2 handfuls fresh baby spinach leaves
1 large bunch of parsley, leave plucked or shorn off with a knife. A little bit of stem is okay.
1 tablespoon raw, unsalted sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds (15 ml)
1 small clove garlic
1 tablespoon lemon juice (15 ml)
1/4 to 1/2 cup olive oil (60 ml to 120 ml)
Salt and pepper

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 400 °F (204 °C).

Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Prepare a small bowl of ice water as well.

Blanch the spinach in the boiling water for 10 seconds. Drain. Drop the spinach into the ice water to cool. Drain and squeeze excess water out of the leaves.

Finely chop the spinach and put it in a food processor with the parsley, sunflower seeds, garlic and lemon juice. Process until the parsley is finely chopped. With the blade running, drizzle in olive oil until desired consistency is reached. Add salt to taste.

Cut two 14-inch squares of parchment paper. (35 cm)

Create a small bed of bell pepper and squash slices in the middle of each paper. Set the fish on top. Season the fish and veggies lightly with salt and pepper.

Spread about 1 tablespoon of pesto on top of each piece of fish.

There are many ways to fold the parchment into sealed pockets around the fish. Here is one:

Fold over 1 inch (2.5 cm) of the paper on the sides that are closest to the short sides of the fish fillets.

Bring together the other two sides of the parchment, over the top of the long sides of the fillets. Fold these sides together twice to seal.

Fold over and crimp the short ends of the paper to seal.

Set the pockets on a rimmed baking sheet. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes until fish is opaque in the middle.

Open the parchment carefully to avoid stem. Garnish the fish and veggies with more pesto and serve.

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I’m Going Into My 40th Year Feeling Healthier Than Ever!

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!

“Affliction comes to us, not to make us sad but sober; not to make us sorry but wise.”

H. G. Wells

Since it was the Friday Success Stories that truly inspired me to go Primal, I thought I’d share my own. My journey to the Primal lifestyle started about a year after I gave birth to triplets (around January of 2012). At that point I had made multiple trips to the doctors with health complaints. I’m guessing my doctor thought I was a hypochondriac, but my body had started falling apart, and it was affecting my ability to care for my trio. I was reminded by my doctor how pregnancy (and breastfeeding) takes a toll on your body, and even more so with triplets. I just wanted to cry at the prospect that this was the new normal. I felt so blessed to have these three healthy babies, but hated feeling like I couldn’t be the mom I had imagined.

Growing up I had periods of sickness; I remember having to repeat 4th grade because I had too many sick days. Even as I child I recognized that certain foods made my stomach hurt. I remember loving the taste of fast food, but hating the way it made me feel afterwards. Around 6th grade I started participating in sports, started feeling a little better, and continued to feel relatively healthy through college. After college, I noticed some of the same feelings of sickness after eating; grumbling stomach and frequent trips to the bathroom. I knew it was probably something in my diet, but wasn’t willing to make the commitment to any type of elimination diet to figure out what was causing the issues. It wasn’t until after giving birth that I felt like I’d hit rock bottom, and wanted to get to the root of the problem.

One of the things I hated most is that people didn’t seem to take me seriously because I didn’t really look sick. On the inside I felt like I was dying. Some of the things I had been experiencing were: night sweats, racing heart, trouble sleeping, anxiety, rashes around my mouth and face, hip and chest pains, tingling feeling in my extremities, recurring symptoms of endometriosis (I had had laparoscopic surgery to remove endo and cysts in 2009), and intestinal issues that seemed to be getting worse. When I told my doctor about my symptoms, he decided to do some blood tests. The results showed that I was severely vitamin D deficient and slightly anemic, but other than that everything seemed “normal”.

I was given high dose vitamin D supplements to take for a month, and told to come back and repeat the blood test. He also did a mammogram and tested for peri menopause, and both were normal. I was told to take NSAIDs for the pain, and that I should cut back on caffeine. I didn’t notice much of a difference with the supplements, but followed the doctor’s advice. I decided to start doing my own research. I noticed some of my symptoms were similar to these with gluten intolerance. I gave my sister Laura a call because I knew she had gone gluten free along with her fiancé who is gluten intolerant. She suggested I try going gluten free (GF) for a few weeks and see if it helped with my symptoms. The idea of giving up bread, pasta, and beer was almost more than I could fathom. Sourdough bread slathered with butter had long been my go-to comfort food, especially when I was sick (which was a lot). Where would I find my comfort now?

I must have had the low carb flu because the first week gluten free was tough (headaches, constant hunger, extreme irritability). Then something amazing happened about a week in, I noticed some of my symptoms clearing up. I started sleeping better at night, and experiencing a little more energy. But it didn’t take long to find gluten-free replacement foods (read: high carb & processed); I was happy to have my bread (GF) and pasta (rice) back again. I found some gluten free websites to get ideas about how to go gluten free. It was great to find a place to commiserate with others who were stuck with GF beer, and finding replacement flours for their favorite cookie recipes. Around this time I noticed I was gaining a little weight (and feeling bloated), and feeling a little depressed at the prospect of never having gluten again (the GF beer *is* lacking in the taste department).

It was right around the time of my 20th high school reunion (June 2012) that I mentioned to my sister Clare that I had gone gluten free. She recommended that I check out Mark’s Daily Apple, and told me specifically about the success stories. What struck me most was how upbeat the success stories were; these people didn’t seem like they were losing out on anything by changing their lifestyles. So many of the GF (and celiac) websites I had visited focused on what you couldn’t have, so this was a breath of fresh air.

My sister loaned me her copy of The Primal Blueprint (I still need to give it back), and I started reading it at the babies’ nap time. I ended up getting the Kindle edition as well, so it traveled easily in my already cramped diaper bag. The principles of PB made a lot of sense to me. I had long been a chronic cardio junkie, but training for marathons usually left me sick and injured. As a Social Science major, the evolutionary viewpoint using the Grok analogy really struck a chord. I had been a victim of the Standard American Diet for a long time, and I think deep down I knew that my diet played a role in my symptoms.

I’m going into my 40th year feeling healthier than ever! I have the energy to keep up with my 2 1/2 year old toddlers. And who knew playing outdoors could be so fun!? I definitely underestimated the power of play. Although I do still run for fun, I don’t push it as hard as I used to; my kids love it when I run “super-fast” (sprint). I don’t have to go far to find heavy things to lift, considering my guys still love to be carried. I’m trying to teach them to live Primal by setting a good example. We’ve started growing some of our own vegetables, and they love to help harvest.

Best of all, ALL of my health issues have improved, and then some. I had been a skeptic that diet changes would cure my deteriorating health. Those rashes around my mouth that were irritating and made me self-conscious have cleared up. No more racing heart, night sweats, or bone pain! I am no longer vitamin D deficient. I am still amazed by how many of my symptoms improved. There were so many “little” health issues that I just attributed to getting older or bad genes that improved as well. I no longer have issues with: sinus headaches, insomnia, teeth grinding, cracking joints (only after a tough workout), dry eyes, balance, mood swings, anxiety, brain fog, bloating, swollen feet, and I no longer have to take any “sick days” during my monthly cycle due to pain and cramping.

And then there’s all the things I gained: energy (oh the energy!!), clearer eyes, muscle definition, healthier hair and nails, softer skin, more vivid dreams, the best sleep I’ve had in years. Most importantly, I’m able to be the kind of mom I’d hoped to be to my energetic trio. My husband recently asked, “but don’t you miss pizza?”; I didn’t respond, instead I showed him the long list of symptoms that had improved since going Primal. I’d much rather have my health than an Ultimate Slice.

I’m definitely a work-in-progress, but it feels great to be going in the right direction. I occasionally eat a little more dark chocolate than I probably should, and I’m still warming up to sweet potatoes in lieu of white potatoes. I also need to work on getting more sleep, but I can say when I sleep now it’s a much sounder sleep than before. I actually even nap from time to time, whereas in the past it was near impossible to ever just relax enough to nap.

I’m guessing I’m not the only one who loves the before and after photos. I don’t have any that are too dramatic (I did throw in a “scary” pregnancy photo for fun though), but I used to have a constant bloated look, and never had much muscle definition (skinny fat). I recently took one of my kids into the pediatrician (it had been about 6 months), and he asked how much weight I had lost. I honestly couldn’t tell him because I didn’t keep track, but it has been a nice side effect. The comments have gone from, “you look good for having triplets” to just “you look good!”; both are nice, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I prefer the latter.

I’m so grateful to have found this site and The Primal Blueprint. Thank you, Mark, and to all who have helped me along the way. And to all the naysayers, I dare you to try it for 21 days. What have you got to lose!

Grok on!!

Barbara

Pre-triplet belly

Pre-primal

Post-primal

Post-primal work-out

Post-primal play

Post-primal happy family

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The Power of Giving: What We Get When We Give

Pretty much every post on Mark’s Daily Apple takes up the question of how we can be happier, healthier and more productive in the modern world. We eat well, exercise effectively, play frequently, sleep deeply, socialize meaningfully, create freely, de-stress religiously and sun ourselves daily. They’re the tickets to a well-rounded and healthy life today, and they all not-so-coincidentally supported the survival of our ancestors. They’re the primal stuff of life – of what it means to be physically and cognitively human. I think we’d be remiss to not include in this list the also very human concept of giving.

By giving, let me say, I don’t necessarily mean money. Money by itself can help make a lot of useful and beneficial things happen – for an individual or for an organization that helps individuals in some essential way. What I’m talking about here is service – the time, energy and effort we give to help other people and causes. Of course, we become a positive force in the universe when we do so. We help out a neighbor, spare another forest acre, enhance a community’s hope and opportunity. We make a friend’s day. The evolutionary undercurrent here is mutual benefit. Sure, we’re helping others, but we’re also benefiting ourselves in ways we might not expect.

Sure, we get that gratifying “helper’s high,” the blast of feel good hormones such as oxytocin. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, however. In an employee study (PDF) conducted by United Health Group, those who volunteered scored better on nine measures of emotional wellness that included “personal independence, capacity for rich interpersonal relationships and overall satisfaction with life.” Of those who volunteered, the majority said they felt less stress and nearly all reported that their service enhanced their “sense of purpose in life.”

Research has found significant benefits for older adults in particular. In a randomized clinical trial involving Baltimore’s Experience Corps, Johns Hopkins researchers observed physical and cognitive benefits in older adult volunteers who tutored in urban schools. Participants reported significant gains in perception of social support and connectedness as well as physical strength and mobility. Another Carnegie Mellon University study found volunteering was associated with a 40% lower risk of high blood pressure in older adults. It’s possible the kind of volunteering can influence gains as well. Larger scale research out of Cornell University showed older adults who volunteered with an environmental stewardship program were less likely to experience depression in later years. The lower risk was 50% for environmental volunteers and 10% for non-environmental causes/services. Finally, research shows volunteerism significantly lowers mortality risk in one study by over 60%.

For all the focus on older adults, however, people in any age group experience advantages. Adolescent in a University of British Columbia study showed lower BMI, inflammation and cholesterol readings following a ten week volunteer period. Emotional and physical changes appeared to go hand in hand. As the director of the study noted, “[Those] who reported the greatest increases in empathy, altruistic behavior and mental health were the ones who also saw the greatest improvements in their cardiovascular health.”

The number of hours devoted to volunteering each week doesn’t appear to influence most benefits, but the length of years does matter. As you can imagine, the longer you do it, the greater the benefit. Likewise, those who volunteer for self-focused reasons didn’t benefit compared to non-volunteers. Apparently, we can intellectually know we’ll benefit, but the advantages come when we let go of that intention.

It all makes perfect sense. Genuine giving isn’t an act from the self as much as a participation in the world and relationships around us. Anthropologists who’ve studied modern hunter-gatherer groups explain how band members’ identities are created through participation in the group. They become individuals within the context of the group, growing and accepted in relationship to the group, within an evolving give and take investment in the group.

I don’t consider myself a religious person but was always intrigued by the idea of vocation put forth by writer and theologian Frederick Buechner: “Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” The happiest and most fulfilled people I know are those who feel they practice a vocation in life – whether or not it’s how they earn their living.

We just aren’t wired to have hours of time to wallow in chronic and ineffectual solipsism. Giving in whatever sense – formal volunteering, help to friends and neighbors, environmental work – helps us get out of heads. A larger cause (even if it’s just in a one-on-one exchange) than ourselves budges out the self-chatter. We can be in the moment and take “a vacation from our problems.”

In an age when we build an online “profile” and stylize our image to our heart’s (and ambition’s) content, we can more than ever lose sight of where and how we’re really made. We’re not our assembled “likes” and “shares” or our crafted “timelines.” We’re not our collection of pithy tweets. We’re our in-the-flesh contributions.

In giving of yourself – whether through parenthood, vocational service or other social commitments/relationships – I think you gain a certain confidence in your own worth and ability. We can chat ourselves up in our own minds from now until doomsday, but all the psychological pomp and primping is just grandiosity on its own. In acting and exchanging, in offering one’s self and service – that’s where the rubber meets the road. It’s where we’re truly tried and tested – where we grow. Ultimately, it illuminates the divide between grandiosity and gravitas.

We take the lessons – the perspective and humility and all the other goodies – back to our own lives. In the words of Norman Vincent Peale, “When you become detached mentally from yourself and concentrate on helping other people with their difficulties, you will be able to cope with your own more effectively. Somehow, the act of self-giving is a personal power-releasing factor.” In part, the benefits come from our enhanced empathy. As author of The Power of Empathy, Katherine Ketcham, explains, those “who have high relational skills are more successful personally and professionally.” We can be more effective in our work roles and emotional relationships. Overall, we enjoy a more fulfilling life and enhanced well-being. What could be more Primal than that?

As for what you can do in the MDA community, think about this. The Mark’s Daily Apple health challenge begins next month. How could you inspire someone to join or encourage someone who’s already part of the community? How might you pay it forward? I think it’s a great time to spread the word and let others find inspiration (and solutions) within the community. Stay tuned…

What are your thoughts on the power of volunteering? Do you have favorite ways and means of giving? What do you enjoy giving of your self and time? What do you feel you receive? I’ll look forward to reading your feedback. Thanks for reading, everyone, and have a good end to the week.

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How I Recover from My Workouts

When thinking about ways to improve your workout recovery, you might start by going back to this post I wrote a couple weeks ago and then doing the opposite of the recovery-impairing items on that list. So, if you’re trying to do too much in the gym in too little time, you should probably start doing less. Since nutrient deficiencies can contribute to poor recovery, you should eat plenty of those nutrients. And if stress is a huge recovery killer, it would obviously make sense to figure out ways to reduce and mitigate stress in your life. Easier said than done, right? Well, today I’m going to give you some concrete tips and techniques I personally use to improve my workout recovery.

Let’s jump right in…

As you know, I like to keep things simple. The days where I’d willingly and happily engage in extensive workout recovery plans are long gone. My entire workout “routine” is designed so that I don’t have to spend half my time recovering from my training. I can take care of most of my recovery passively – through getting good sleep every night, sticking to a Primal way of eating full of (colorful) plants and animal parts, avoiding stress when possible, and getting plenty of outdoor time. In other words, just doing what I already do as part of my daily routine is effective. But if I happen to conduct a particularly strenuous and challenging and/or long workout, I’ll often employ a few extra recovery tactics.

Although most of these suggestions will be familiar to you, I’ll bet you’re still not employing them as often or as effectively as you should. We have the tendency to neglect the simple, time-tested stuff in favor of the sexy, elaborate stuff, when the vast majority of people would be better served by the former. Without further ado, here’s what I do for recovery.

I Cool Down After Workouts

Warmups get most of the attention, and they’re definitely important if you’re not addressing your mobility and flexibility on a regular, ongoing basis, but I’m more keen on cool downs, which don’t get nearly enough attention. In fact, for workout recovery, cool downs are essential. Why?

It hastens recovery from the stress of exercise. An elevated heart rate is an indicator of a stressed state. A cool down period following exercise, meanwhile, lowers the resting heart rate by increasing cardiac vagal tone, a physiological marker for reduced stress. Since exercise is a huge stressor (that’s why it works!), recovering from exercise requires stress reduction, or normalization.

For nighttime exercisers, it helps you get to sleep after training. Parents, you know how small children who’ve just been playing need to wind down in order to fall asleep? Same thing applies here. A nice gradual cool down can lower the heart rate and “ease you into” a more sleep-appropriate physiological state.

Though research suggests that cool downs do not reduce delayed onset muscle soreness, I’ve had the opposite experience.

My “cool downs” aren’t very involved. Most times I’ll just go for a walk or a light jog afterwards, maybe with some light stretching. They’re always easy. Light jogs are very light. I’m not grinding out super tough stretches and staying in a painful spot; I’m touching the end range and pulling back immediately.

If the workout was a full-body affair (strength training, Ultimate Frisbee), I’ll do some sort of cool down “cardio” -  walking, light jogging, cycling, rowing. And then I shake things out: first by bouncing on the balls of my feet and letting my arms hang limp and bounce as they will all over the place and then by planting my feet, rotating my hips back and forth, and letting my arms flop all over.

There are no set guidelines here. Just cool down until you feel sufficiently relaxed with your regular heart rate.

I Immerse Myself in Cool or Cold Water

Cold water thermogenesis was all the rage a couple years ago, but athletes interested in recovery from their training have been employing cold water for decades. Contrasted hot/cold baths, ice water plunges, cold water immersion – whatever the exact modality, getting cold water all over your body seems to help speed recovery. A few of the latest examples:

Cold water exposure restores muscle contractile function and reduces soreness following simulated collision sports (in this case, rugby).

Both cold water immersion and hot/cold contrast therapy help restore force production following high intensity interval training.

Cold water immersion helps sprinters maintain their performance over the course of consecutive training days, according to a new study.

Cold water immersion helps basketball players recover from their games.

I’ve been using my pool, which I keep fairly cold (in the mid 50s in winter, warmer in summer), for workout recovery for several years now. Some people use full-on ice baths. Others stick to cold showers. They all work. I prefer the pool (or alternately the ocean) for a few reasons:

It’s cold, but not too cold. I don’t dread going in, so I go in more often.
It allows active recovery. In a bathtub, all I can do is sit and shiver. In the pool, I can do laps, tread water, run, and swim around.
It’s sustainable. I’m not going to buy huge bags of ice every time I want to take a bath.

Evidence suggests that full body immersion is the most effective cooling method and sprinting is the most responsive type of training.

I’ve Experimented with Compression Gear

A couple years ago, I tried compression garments following sprint workouts. I did this at the recommendation of the same friend who got me into cool water exposure. His general trustworthiness and the fact that it “just worked” was enough for me, but there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that compression gear really does improve exercise recovery:

Compression garments appear to reduce muscle soreness and improve subjective perceptions of recovery, according to a recent study.

Following a sprint and 3 km run workout meant to simulate a rugby match, players wearing compression clothing experience less muscle soreness 48 hours post workout and improved performance.

A 2013 meta-analysis concluded that “compression garments are effective in enhancing recovery from muscle damage.”

I’ve tried wearing compression tights both during and following a sprint session and grueling strength training session. I haven’t seen major improvements in recovery or soreness, but the research is interesting. I’d say it’s worth trying if you’re looking for an additional way to tinker with your own recovery.

I Work on Mobility and Movement

Even though collapsing into a slovenly heap on the couch might be a superficially attractive option after a really hard workout, don’t do it. You’re gonna regret it. Your muscles and the fascia that surrounds them are trying to recover from the day’s work. They’re trying to get their bearings. If you “recover” by sitting around, your muscles are going to get extremely comfy and established in those sedentary positions. Then, when you try to train again, you’ll need a lengthy and protracted warmup session just to feel somewhat normal and ready to move. Why go through that when you could just maintain a steady flow of movement throughout the recovery period?

Here’s what I swear by on a daily basis:

Lots of walking. You guys know this about me, but I really feel constant low-level movement is a major contributor to my workout recovery because it just keeps my body primed to move. Aim for 10,000 steps a day as a nice goal.

Frequent Grok squatting. I try to squat for at least five-ten solid minutes per day. Not all in one chunk, mind you, but distributed throughout the day. The Russian Baby Maker is a great way to start the morning and open up the hips, I’ve found.

A couple minutes of crawling. Slow, deliberate, lengthy contralateral crawling really seems to stretch everything out and make my joints feel right.

And if I really need to focus on mobility:

Search MobilityWOD for whatever body part or movement is ailing me, and then do that WOD.

Do some yoga. I’m not a regular, and probably never will be, but I’ve personally had great success fixing some nagging mobility deficits with yoga techniques. Yoga’s also a great way to reduce stress and improve sleep, two common impediments to workout recovery.

Of all that stuff, though, walking is probably the most profound.

I Do Some Self Massage

Although a legitimate deep tissue massage from a professional (or enthusiastic loved one) can’t really be topped, its beneficial effects on recovery can be emulated. Self massage, also known as self myofascial release, involves using an object (usually an external implement, but sometimes a knuckle, elbow, or knee) to break up adhesions/knots in the fascia/muscle. This “releases” the tissue and allows normal, full movement that was being limited by the adhesions. If you can’t move your body or get into the proper positions, you haven’t recovered from your workout and any future workouts will suffer. Here’s how I do it when my muscles need a release:

I foam roll. A formerly conspicuous dearth has recently given way to a steady stream of evidence supporting the use of foam rolling for increasing knee range of motion without decreasing strength, increasing hamstring range of motion without decreasing strength, reduced soreness after a hard workout, and even improving arterial function. In my experience, foam rolling is most effective on the upper back, the anterior and lateral thighs, and the calf. If the foam roller isn’t enough for you, try a PVC pipe or the Rumbleroller.

I use a lacrosse ball. More precise than the foam roller, the lacrosse ball is well suited for hamstrings, that area right above the knee cap, the hips, the glutes, and the scapular region. The RAD Roller is also great.

A good rule for self release is to find a sensitive spot and stay there until it stops being so sensitive, moving the joint through a full range of motion and oscillating back and forth on the spot. So, if you’re digging into the area above your knee cap with a lacrosse ball, flex and extend the knee while applying pressure.

I Train by Playing as Much as Possible

A big part of workout recovery is mental. Workouts are, well, work. They’re hard. People fear them. They dread them even as they “know” it’s for their own good. This makes a workout a mentally stressful endeavor that you feel obligated to undertake, as if a choice is being made for you. That’s an awful feeling – helplessness – that has been shown to increase stress.

Play, on the other hand, is fun. You look forward to it. You willingly choose to play. You’re happy to do it. When I can obtain a training effect through play, I’ve won. When I can get my sprints via Ultimate Frisbee and my core and balance training via stand-up paddle boarding or slacklining, I couldn’t be happier. (Some of you have asked for recent photos of me following my 60th birthday last month. The photos in this post were taken after an hour and a half paddle session in the Pacific Ocean near Malibu a few weeks back.) These activities are still physically demanding, yes, and they still require physical recovery, but I’ve nullified the mental stress that often accompanies a grueling workout. Since general stress places a burden on our recovery capabilities, this leaves me more resources to devote to physical recovery from training.

I don’t follow all these all the time (well, accept for the post workout cool downs and the play one – I am always trying to figure out new ways to train through play), so don’t think you need to find a cold body of water every day, buy a full body compression garment for every day of the week, spend every idle moment with a lacrosse ball embedded in your glutes, or eschew all furniture to perpetually work on your mobility in order to recover from your workouts. These are merely tools to be employed as needed, and that work for me personally.

That’s all I’ve got for today, folks. Hope you found it helpful!

Have You Seen the New Book? Get Your Copy of The Paleo Primer and Claim Your FREE Gifts While the Special Offer Lasts

The Clock Is Ticking: Special Offer Ends on August 31!

In the short clip above, Keris Marsden and Matt Whitmore – authors of The Paleo Primer – show us how living a healthy Primal life in London, England inspired their debut book, and share a special thank you to everyone that has already ordered a copy.

Remember, the special offer period for The Paleo Primer ends in just a few days on Aug. 31 at 11:59 pm PST. Pick up a copy by then and you’ll get a bunch of free stuff from PrimalBlueprint.com. Learn more about this fantastic new book and your free gifts here. Grok on!

P.S. Stay tuned for today’s regularly scheduled blog post wherein I share my personal strategy for workout recovery.

Have You Seen the New Book? Get Your Copy of The Paleo Primer and Claim Your FREE Gifts While the Special Offer Lasts

10 Rules for Becoming an Ancestral Athlete

This is a guest post from Ben Greenfield. Ben is a strength and conditioning coach and sports nutritionist who teaches athletes and exercise enthusiasts how to achieve amazing feats of physical performance without destroying their bodies. He is the head triathlon coach at Pacific Elite Fitness, blogs and podcasts at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, hosts the Get-Fit Guy show, and has a new book coming out called “Beyond Training“.

Among other things, Ben is known for conducting self-experiments – often on very fringe ideas – to learn what can give him and his clients a competitive advantage. His next challenge that flies in the face of conventional wisdom is to win the amateur division at Ironman Canada in a fully ketogenic state. His experience training and competing at a high level using an ancestral framework is what I am particularly interested in, and I think you may be too. Now, enter Ben…

1. Change Your Lens

If you’re into fitness, diet or healthy living, then you’re bombarded every day by new workouts, fat loss methods, training templates, nutrition supplements, camps, clinics, diets, phone apps, biohacks, research studies and a mind-boggling variety of ways for you to enhance your body.

But for you to truly know whether the latest fad is going to be naturally healthy and perfectly meld with your ancestral self, you must look at everything through the lens of health vs. performance. In other words, you must not only question whether any particular method is efficacious, but also question what the long term health or longevity results will be.

Take fat loss, for example. You’ve probably seen the story on TV. An obese person, often in excess of 400 pounds, is subjected to weeks of calorie restriction and extreme levels of physical activity with hours of exercise each day – and the fat melts off like magic. But if you want this “Biggest Loser” style weight loss, you need to be careful. With the combination of extreme calorie restriction and excessive exercise, you need to prepare for long-lasting metabolic damage, accompanied organ loss of vital regions such as your heart and liver and a drop in your metabolism of nearly 30%! Sure – there are fat loss “performance” benefits, but the long term health implications are dire when compared to a slow, steady and patient weight loss.

Or take the available evidence that a high carbohydrate diet and carbohydrate loading results in superior performance in endurance athletes. While this statement is certainly true, it only applies to acute performance, and has significant long term downstream implications, such as pancreatic failure, nerve damage or chronic inflammation. If that’s worth it to you, then you are either mildly masochistic or you have decided that you value performance much more than health. If you desire a long, quality life, you may need to use a new lens.

On the flipside, a very low carbohydrate diet has been shown to improve metabolic efficiency, but in many people – especially females – chronic, excessive carbohydrate depletion can cause hypothyroidism and other hormone imbalances – so once again, you must use the lens of health vs. performance, listen to your body and question long term health implications (in this case, the consequences of low carbohydrate intake can be mitigated with sane amounts of carbohydrate intake, while avoiding excessive restriction).

2. Be Uncomfortable

At the recent Ancestral Health Symposium, I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Nassim Taleb, the author of the excellent book Anti-Fragile. In the talk, Nassium illustrated how just as bones and muscles become stronger when subjected to variety, stress and tension, many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility, and turmoil.

In other words, it’s OK (and perfectly ancestral) to be uncomfortable and to have randomness in your life. Ancient man did not have air conditioning and central heating – so it’s OK for your bedroom, your office or your car to sometimes be too hot, or too cold. Refrigerators have not always been a luxury of mankind – so it’s OK to sometimes be hungry, sometimes fast, and sometimes eat completely random meals you’d normally never eat (breakfast for dinner, anyone?). Sometimes lions and bears jump out and chase you – so it’s OK to skip that aerobic bike ride and instead do a short, intense, 4 minute Tabata set – and vice versa.

So be uncomfortable. Expose your body to occasional, sane amounts of natural stress and disorder. This will fight fragility, keep you alive and vibrant, and allow your lungs, muscles and heart to overcome gradually adapting to the demands you place upon them.

3. Be Comfortable

Yes, I’ve purposefully listed rule number 3 to be in stark contrast to rule number 2. After all – constant discomfort is the equivalent of chronic stress.

A warrior does not constantly fight. They rest between the big battles. And the best athletes on the face of the planet know that their biggest gains come from the days spent between the tough sessions. In contrast, the time they feel most worn down are when the body gets dug into a hole from constant tough sessions with no breaks. This is the whole concept behind splitting a training year, month and week into specific periods that include both work and rest.

But instead, we often try to make every workout a masochistic, pain-cave experience that leaves us gasping for oxygen for hours. Or we avoid that red-hot intensity and instead wear the body down with long junk miles for hour on end. Either way, we never quite feel satisfied unless we roll out of bed with a slight degree of soreness or end the day having burnt as many calories as possible.

This happens in life too. For example, we set aside time to play with our children, but the whole time, we have a smartphone in our pocket with vibrating notifications from work, Facebook or Twitter. Or we go out to a relaxing dinner, but strategically place that same phone beside our plate – just to satisfy our addiction to work and a need for constant productivity or stimulation.

But sometimes, your body and mind simply need to be comfortable. To rest. To be allowed to be lazy. I’ve written about how nerve cell repair, formation of memory, recovery of the adrenal glands, muscle building and removal of inflammation all occur when your body and mind are in a peaceful state. And yet, many of us simply don’t know how to stop working. The ability to relax and rest is a positive habit that must be acquired, and often requires breaking your hardwired drive to be constantly productive.

4. Work

My father-in-law is a skinny, ex-Montana rancher who now spends his time managing a sheep farm at University of Idaho. When our family goes to visit him, I get to witness his daily routine of an early morning of feeding hungry sheep, followed by a day of walking through pastures, lifting farm machinery, and fixing equipment. Perhaps this physical work experience was passed on to his daughter, because during the spring and summer, my wife rarely exercises. Instead, she spends her day in our backyard garden, pushing a heavy wheelbarrow, digging holes, moving rocks, planting trees and pulling weeds.

If you’re lucky enough to be a farmer, a gardener, a builder, a personal trainer or have any other profession that involves daily periods of moving, lifting, bending, rowing, pushing, pulling, lunging, or squatting then you know how the body feels after a day of this kind of work – energized, awake and alive. It’s a much different feeling than the stale, burnt-out, fried state most people are in after long periods of time spent slouched in a chair staring at a computer screen or hunched over the steering wheels of a car or truck for hours on end.

I’m not saying that you need to quit your office job, but you do need to hack your job to simulate the hunter-gatherer lifestyle as much as possible. Get a standing workstation or treadmill desk. Install a pull-up bar in the door of your office. If you work from home, keep something heavy in your garage, like a sandbag or barbell that you can go lift every now and again. Never sit for longer than an hour without standing and doing jumping jacks, body weight squats or some hip opener stretches.

After all, research has shown that when it comes to your health and longevity, it doesn’t matter how hard you exercise at the end of a long day of work if you’re spending the entire day in a seated position. So simply think about how you can adjust your daily routine so that your body is in a constantly active mode.

5. Optimize Fertility

I believe it was Tim Ferriss who I first heard say “A fertile man is a healthy man”.

And this makes perfect sense.

Whether you’re a man or woman, the loss of ability to mate or to propagate future generations is a sure sign that your body is degrading, and that you’re running low on the hormones, vitamins, and minerals to sustain life. For example, due to the relatively small size of the femoral artery compared to the larger arteries feeding the heart, poor circulation or blood vessel blockage from arginine deficiencies, low nitric oxide, or excessive plaque from mineral imbalances will often manifest in erectile dysfunction or lack of blood flow to sexual organs long before an actual heart attack takes place. This is simply the “canary in the mine”.

We’re lucky enough in our modern era to be able to test hormones of fertility, such as testosterone, estrogens, progesterone, DHEA, sex hormone binding globulin and other compounds that – if low or imbalanced – result in impotence, infertility, a lack of sexual drive, an inability to experience sexual pleasure. Even if you don’t have access to fancy quantitative testing protocols, you can still keep your finger on the qualitative pulse of your fertility by paying attention to your libido, your orgasms, your monthly cycles, your erections, your fluid production.

As a man, I can personally attest to the fact that my best athletic performance come during the same week’s when my sexual performance peaks. In my consults with many women, I’ve noticed that the the loss of a menstruation often comes several months before the stress fractures, overtraining syndrome and drop in athletic performance begins.

So make it your goal to not simply “survive”, but to thrive. And thriving means maintaining a potent ability to make babies, whether or not you actually act on that ability.

6. Eat The Earth

To keep my body in a maximum state of fatty acid utilization, I personally use a combination of Superstarch, X2Performance, Essential Amino Acids, VESPA Wasp Extract and MCT Oil when I’m competing in Ironman triathlon. But the truth is that although this cocktail is relatively healthy compared to sugar-laden engineered beverages, gels, bars and gooey alternatives, I avoid it at all costs unless I absolutely must consume it.

Instead, I’m far happier simply eating food that comes straight from the earth in its real, recognizable form. Whether I’m heading out for a bike ride with a ziplock of raw almonds in my jersey, chomping on a sweet potato before a weight training session, or simply letting the real meals that I spread throughout the day fuel any physical activity I may do, I try to avoid taking the trouble to worry about advanced fueling science or engineering “pre and post-workout nutrition” unless absolutely necessary – such as when aerodynamics, weight or time spent to consume fuel becomes a performance consideration.

You can call this Primal, Paleo, Ancestral, Perfect, Just Eating Real Food or any other fancy name you’d like, but the fact is that eating naturally should form the crux of your athletic fuel. The idea of mixing up a shake from your gym bag, unwrapping a factory-made energy bar, or dumping powders into a bike bottle should be a strange, foreign and rare activity for you that you save for the times when you’re actually doing something relatively “unnatural”, like rowing a half marathon at the CrossFit Games or toeing the line of a marathon or triathlon.

7. Empty the Trash

Many athletes and exercise enthusiasts go years without cleaning up their insides. But you significantly stress the detox and waste removal pathways in your liver, kidney, pancreas and gut from the thousands of calories you must consume to support consistent exercise or difficult feats of physical performance. When you combine this with the inflammation, ammonia-based toxins and metabolites that build up in your muscles and bloodstream during tough workouts and life stress, you must at some point allow your organs the luxury of being cleaned and de-stressed.

Your ancestors did not always have a steady, never-ending influx of calories, and sometimes had to simply eat fewer calories and move less. In other words, training to eat and eating to train was not a standard 365 day-a-year routine that many of us practice.

I’ve written before how fasting and detoxing are potent strategies for taking out the trash that builds up in your vital organs and cells, but I’ve witnessed many athletes only take this information halfway to heart, and simply use daily consumption of an antioxidant, gut flush, or liver cleansing supplement to justify continuing to eat as much as possible and exercise at maximum capacity each day.

The fact is that to truly empty your body’s trash you must combine these kinds of detoxification nutrients with complete rest and low calorie intake. So choose one day of the week or month, one week of the season, or one month of the year to be a period of time that combines low levels of restorative physical activity with low calorie intake and a detoxification protocol.

You wouldn’t let the trash accumulate, ferment and rot in your kitchen, office or bathroom for years on end, would you? Treat your body similarly.

8. Use Science

There are some athletes who take the idea of “living ancestrally” a bit too far. They never use supplements or fancy blenders, they avoid expensive recovery technology like electrostimulation and compression gear, and they never go near a heart rate variability monitor or self-quantification device.

They argue this is natural, unplugged living.

But ironically, these same athletes then exposure their body to extremely unnatural situations, such as running for miles on hard pavement besides diesel truck polluted roads, sitting with their delicate reproductive organ tissues on a hard bicycle saddle for hours on end, swimming in chlorinated water, pumping iron in a gym bombarded with electromagnetic frequencies and cleaning chemicals, eating herbicide-tainted fruits and vegetables grown in mineral depleted soil and drinking weekly gallons of fluoridated water from the local municipal water supply.

The fact is that unless you’re a monk living on a pristine mountaintop in the Himalayas, you sometimes need to accept the fact that you live in a post-industrial era, you’re often exposing your body to relatively unnatural activities, foods and environments, and you may actually need a bit of better living through science.

Your ancestors weren’t dummies. If they didn’t have a chance to eat coldwater fish every day, I bet they’d consider popping that triglyceride-based fish oil supplement in your refrigerator. If their muscles were racked, sore and swollen from a day of hiking, hunting or gathering, I bet they’d actually appreciate a bit of compression gear, cold thermogenesis, electrostimulation or some other fancy “unnatural” modern recovery protocol. If they were hurdling in a metal tube with wings 40,000 feet above the ground to a destination six time zones away, I bet they’d consider using an earthing device or taking a melatonin supplement.

So be smart and use science when it makes sense.

9. Keep A Clear Head

How many times have you found yourself eating lunch while simultaneously reading a blog post, playing a podcast and responding to an e-mail? How many times have you been at the gym, riding your bike or even taking a relaxing bath and found yourself texting, Tweeting, or Facebooking? How many times have you found yourself listening to the radio, driving a car, and taking quick glances at the e-mails on your smart phone – all at the same time?

The fact is that this kind of distracting multi-tasking not only gives you fuzzy thinking, poor creative production, sensory overload, neurotransmitter depletion and chronic stress, but it’s also downright dangerous. If you’ve ever tried to start a fire in the mountains, gut a deer after a kill-shot, or fight off an assailant, then you know that these activities require intense concentration in survival or potential life-and-death situations.

Yet we actually train our minds to constantly become distracted and full of fleeting, random thoughts, tasks and ideas. There’s new evidence that suggests this is actually the equivalent of training ourselves to form a unique kind of attention deficit disorder. I’ve written about how there’s evidence that this type of multi-tasking also creates decision fatigue that distracts your brain’s cortex from being able to allow you to tap into high levels of physical performance – thus causing you to fatigue faster.

You simply won’t thrive and survive if you’re always distracted by what you’re going to eat for dinner, how you’re going to respond to an e-mail or when you’re going to schedule a meeting. So focus on one task at a time, and be mentally and physically present, especially when it matters most – such as during a workout or when you’re devoting time to your family or children. If you need to, keep a pen or pad handy, assign specific tasks to specific days, and use all of the other mind-clearing productivity techniques I’ve written about before.

Plan wisely for the future, but live in the present with a clear head.

10. Don’t Fret

I know I’ve already talked about my wife, but I’m going to do it again.

I’m jealous of her. She doesn’t think about her carbohydrate, protein and fat ratios. Ever. With an almost childlike innocence, she simply goes out to the garden, opens the refrigerator or cupboard, and eats real food when she wants to. She would know what a gram of carbohydrate looked like if her life depended on it. In contrast, I always have concerns about things like ketosis, protein toxicity or oxidation at the back of my mind.

She doesn’t plan her workouts or write things down in a calendar. When she feels the urge to exercise, she grabs our dog Blitzen and heads out on the trails. When she’s sore or tired, she doesn’t “push through”. In contrast, I adhere to a rigid schedule that has me pressured to complete the day’s workout, no matter how I feel or the intuitive signals my body is sending me.

She doesn’t set an alarm, use a sleep mask, cover up ambient noise with a phone app, or take sleep supplements. She just goes to bed when she’s tired and gets out of bed when her body feels rested and refreshed. In contrast, I wear my nerdish blue light blocking glasses at night, feel guilty if I’m not in bed within several hours of sunset, and pop out of bed wide awake at the identical time each morning.

Is this simply because we’re “hardwired” differently. I doubt it. Watch any child who hasn’t yet been tainted by life stress, peer pressure to get a better body, and diet brainwashing, and they’re the same way. They eat, sleep, play and exercise when they feel like it.

I’m not arguing that there is no value to rigidity, self-control, knowledge and self-discipline. But I do suspect that if we both stay on the same path, my wife will probably outlive me and have a higher quality of life in the process.

So it’s my goal to fret less and live more. This may not make me a better athlete per se, but being an athlete isn’t how I pay the bills. As I’ve said before, the last thing I want written in my obituary or on my tombstone is that “I was really good at exercising”.

What about you?

Summary

I wrote this entire article while hurtling down a highway in the passenger seat of my Toyota on the way to compete in Ironman Canada, with an EMF blocking pad under my Macbook, techno music pumping through my earbuds, and a Wi-Fi hotspot device just two feet from my head.

So I’m chuckling to myself as I reflect on the fact that I’ve penned a piece on ancestral living while living quite un-ancestrally.

But we’re about to pull into a truck stop for a break.

And when we do, I’ll reach into a paper bag in the back of the car, grab a ripe, juicy tomato I plucked from our garden before we hit the road and bite into its juicy flesh, wiping the juice from my chin as I step out of the car and into the warm sunshine. I’ll grab my twin boys and go exploring in the lush trees behind the gas station. Maybe we’ll chase a rabbit or quail. I’ll take a long, lazy, lunging stretch. I’ll kiss my wife. I’ll take a few deep breaths of the fresh wind whipping up the hills behind the highway.

Then we’ll get back in the car and keep driving, but from those few fleeting moments, I’ll feel my ancestral roots thriving for hours afterwards. Will you?

To learn more about Ben, check out his blog and podcast at BenGreenfieldFitness.com, visit his coaching website at Pacific Elite Fitness, and stay tuned for his upcoming new book Beyond Training.

Dear Mark: Changing Trajectories, and Magic Mineral Broth

In today’s edition of Dear Mark I field two Mark’s Daily Apple reader questions. First up, I tackle a query from a reader who’s had to make a small but significant shift to his lifestyle due to changing circumstances. What happens when what’s worked for months and years stops working? When your daily habits, your go-to regimen, or your the behaviors you’ve settled in to no longer produce the exact same results you are used to? What do you do? Then, I discuss the magic of vegetable broth, plus how that magic can be enhanced with the addition of a bone or three.

Let’s go:

I’ve been doing IF for about 15 months and had great success until recently I experienced a decrease in my quality of sleep, probably due to a extra stress with a bit of overtraining.

I decided to return back to eating 3-4 times a day, cut some stress, and cut back on the heavy weight sessions. Anything else you’d recommend?

Carl

Without knowing more details it’s difficult to make any specific recommendations for your particular situation. But I will say that your strategy seems sound. That is, you’ve got your bases covered, and now it’s time to make a few adjustments and see where it leads.

I would say the same to anyone in a similar situation: don’t get too attached to a path if it’s leading you astray.

Carl did IF for over a year to “great success.” I don’t know exactly what success meant for him, but it probably consisted of the usual benefits people see with fasting - fat loss, energy gain, freedom from gnawing hunger, mental well-being, better blood lipids. Whatever it was, it was positive. Until it wasn’t, that is. He was humming along, everything was just working, and then things took a downturn. Because he was on top of it, he was able to figure out that a contextual change in his life – more stress and more training – had altered his response to fasting. He assessed the situation, weighed the variables, and reevaluated and reoriented his current trajectory.

This doesn’t always happen so smoothly. Too often, we get caught up maintaining a formerly successful, even life altering, trajectory once it stops working for us. Not because of blind loyalty or dogmatism, but because it’s hard to grasp that something that worked so well for so long could just stop. I mean, we intellectually know that such a thing can occur. We know that changing circumstances change how we respond to dietary, training, and other lifestyle inputs. But actually reevaluating the thing that got you where you are? That’s hard. After all, it works, right? How could fasting go from helping you drop all that fat and regain all that midmorning energy to making you regain belly fat and require IV coffee just to function? But when the context changes, our response to our lifestyle changes, too, and this necessitates a shift in strategy.

The details of that shift are dependent on your individual situation, of course, so there are no specifics to hand out. There are a few solid general “rules,” though, to aid you in your shift:

Your diet, your exercise, your lifestyle are all supposed to serve you and your goals. Examine everything, especially the stuff you’re really passionate about. When your health is suffering, there are no sacred cows.

More is not always better and results often follow a U-shaped curve. The better our results are, the more we want to push it with the assumption that more is better. No training is bad, some training is good, too much training is bad.

A course altered or temporarily abandoned can always be resumed when the context permits. IF doesn’t work so well with too many additional stressors, but once you remove some of those stressors you should be able to reintegrate IF successfully.

Take a deload week regularly, a planned period of reduced activity where you take it easy, rest, and recuperate from your training. And not just from exercising. Take a deload week from fasting, or calorie restriction, or eating chicken, or anything that you’re doing regularly, just to see how it affects you. Plus, when you get back into the gym, you’ll likely be stronger than before and stronger than you would have been had you never taken the time off. We could all use deload weeks where we pull back, take stock of our situation, and honestly assess whether or not our choices are working for us.

Hi Mark:

I came across a website, with a recipe for “Magic Mineral Broth.”  It’s essentially a vegetable derived mineral broth that claims to be high in magnesium, potassium, and sodium. I’ve read your praises of bone broths and this recipe seems promising, though for different reasons. The recipe calls for the boiling of unpeeled vegetables, including red potatoes, sweet potatoes, and yams. I’ve read your posts about the potential negative effects of glycoalkaloids in potatoes (concentrated in the skins). What are your thoughts on this recipe and do you have any advice to fully primalize a vegetable mineral broth? I’m inclined to throw in a bone or two . . . or three.

Thanks,

Joe

A vegetable broth isn’t a bad idea, to be honest, and that particular recipe for “Magic Mineral Broth” looks good. For those who didn’t click over to the link, it contains carrots, onions, leek, celery, red potatoes, sweet potatoes, garlic, parsley, kelp, peppercorns, allspice, bay leaves, and sea salt. Many traditional cuisines emphasize the usefulness of vegetable water, whether through actual vegetable broth or by simply reusing the water left over from cooking vegetables (also known as “pot liquor“). Some accounts put the mineral losses from normal boiling – which we’ll see as “gains,” since they’re being lost to the broth – at 60-70%. I’d imagine it gets far higher with more extensive boiling.

It’s good, but I think it can definitely be improved. Throw in the bones, Joe, preferably meaty, connective tissue-rich bones like feet or necks (any animal). A vegetable broth? Okay, sure, I’ll drink that. A vegetable broth that gels so hard you can eat it with a fork at room temperature? That’s real magic.

It’s not like bones cancel out or somehow devalue the plant vitamins and minerals. Contrary to what vegans and carnivores might tell you, plants and animals are completely complementary. They work better together, and we need both to function at an optimal level, whether we’re trying to run a farm, fill a dinner plate, or yes, make broth.

As for the glycoalkaloids, I think you’re safe. The gut-irritating potato compounds are notoriously stable. Even after extensive cooking, potato glycoalkaloid levels remain relatively stable, which means the cooking water will contain little to none. Besides, four red potatoes – what the recipe calls for – don’t represent a large enough dose of glycoalkaloids to fret over, especially in a broth that you’ll be using for days or weeks.

All in all, go for the magic broth but make it even more magical by adding some bones, tendon, and sinew (if you can find it).

That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading and keep sending in those burning questions!

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Weekend Link Love

Research of the Week

Let’s add green tea (that you drink) to the list of safe and effective oral sunblocks.

The use of antipsychotic medications in kids with ADHD and depression are associated with an increased risk of diabetes. I almost typed “meditations” instead, which in retrospect probably would have had a different effect on diabetes risk.

Interesting Blog Posts

The newly (and heck, even the experienced) Primal are often at a loss when it comes to packing a healthy lunch. This series at NomNom Paleo addresses the issue head-on.

Here’s what happened to a writer when he abstained from alcohol for forty days.

Navigating the complex world of sustainable seafood.

Media, Schmedia

I like the sentiment and message in this story of a former diet consultant who realized the error of her ways and is now apologizing to former clients for putting them on unsustainably low-calorie diets laden with processed, gluten-rich fare, but I just can’t overlook the egregious “loose/lose” spelling error in the 14th paragraph.

What does a (as yet unverified) 123 year-old coca-chewing, mutton-eating Bolivian man owe to his longevity? Lots of walking.

Everything Else

Could a pill replace exercise? Maybe, at least in mice.

Get better sleep with Beddit, a cool gadget that links up with your phone and attaches to your mattress to track your sleep quality. Resist the urge to wake up in the middle of the night to check your progress, because, well, that kinda defeats the purpose.

This wouldn’t have happened if she had just opted for the lettuce wrap.

It looks like spicy food isn’t just a recent fad: over 6,000 years ago, ancient humans were spicing their food with (at least) mustard garlic seeds, a spice with a wasabi-esque kick.

Recipe Corner

Strawberry chia seed kiwi pudding with almonds.
Beef brisket is so good, but it’s often daunting to tackle yourself. This recipe makes it easy.

Time Capsule

One year ago (Aug 25 – Aug 31)

20 Ways to Cultivate IE in Your Life – Now that you learned exactly what I mean by Intermittent Euphoria, here’s how to make it happen.
The Straight Dope on Cholesterol: 10 Things You Need to Know – Part 1 – Peter Attia begins his incredibly extensive series breaking down the truth about cholesterol.

Comment of the Week

No, no, no–I want him to do a Jack LaLanne-esque swim across the channel (or somewhere) with a flotilla of boats chained together in his mouth. 

- Wenchypoo, make it a standup paddling across the Auau channel (between Lanai and Maui) and I’ll consider it!

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