The New Primal Blueprint: Reprogram Your Genes for Effortless Weight Loss, Vibrant Health, and Boundless Energy

by Mark Sisson

Perfection is impossible. However, striving for perfection is not. Do the best you can under the conditions that exist. That is what counts. —John Wooden

Weight loss does not have to involve the suffering, sacrifice, and deprivation we’ve been conditioned to accept.

Scientists now believe we can change our epigenome through our behaviors, and this is the very essence of the Primal Blueprint: providing the kind of input and environment for our epigenome to direct favorable gene expression to promote health and longevity.

YOU HAVE TO FIT YOUR GENES TO FIT INTO YOUR JEANS

Discussion Of genes

with selection pressure irrelevant (you won’t get eaten by a lion if you get fat), the responsibility falls entirely on you

The big offenders, including sugars and sodas, chemically altered fats, and heavily processed, packaged, fried, and preserved foods, are obvious.

When insulin is high, insulin’s counter regulatory hormone glucagon is usually low.

Unfortunately, when the stress response is triggered repeatedly (by the constant hectic pace of modern life, by a demanding boss, or by overly stressful workouts), your stress response mechanisms eventually wear out, and you produce lower-than-normal levels of cortisol and other hormones critical to many aspects of everyday health. Thyroid hormones and testosterone also become dysregulated from prolonged stress, resulting in fatigue, loss of lean muscle tissue, a suppressed immune system, and the general condition best described as burnout.

For optimal sleep, it’s critical to minimize your exposure to artificial light after dark, to create calm, relaxing transitions into sleep time (and mellow morning routines too), and to obtain sufficient hours of sleep such that you wake up naturally (no alarm). Go to sleep at the same time each night after a tranquil, deliberate wind down—no TV, laptop, tablet or smartphone screens, no heavy exercise, and no big meals or any other high stimulation in the final couple of hours before sleep. Make sure you allow yourself enough time in bed that you are able to wake naturally, near sunrise, feeling refreshed.

Even a 20-minute siesta can make you feel wonderfully refreshed and can also significantly improve your cognitive performance when you are deficient in nighttime sleep.

The moment you flip open that laptop to catch up on emails in the evening, you introduce one of the most destructive genetic offenses in modern life: artificial light after dark. Chronic exposure to excess light and digital stimulation after dark ranks right up there with the consumption of heavily processed junk food as a major disruptor

Stuart Brown, author of Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul and one of the world’s leading experts on play, calls play a “profound biological process.” He explains that play, across the span of a lifetime, promotes the development and maintenance of a “cognitively fluid mind.”

Numerous studies of general intelligence identify curiosity as one of the most profound intelligence markers.