The Primal Blueprint (49 page)

Saturday:
10-minute intense strength-training session. Go for a 7 effort on a 10 scale.

Total Calories Burned:
Who cares! Enough to accelerate fat reduction and get in shape without suffering.

Muscle Groups Exercised:
Arms, legs, core, and everything in between or attached.

Total Scenery Enjoyed:
A ton more than someone on a treadmill or in a Spinning class.

Total Fun Had:
Lots! What a far cry from Kelly Korg’s exhausting regimen of predawn high-intensity workouts, mundane malnutrition shakes replacing real meals, and the resulting fatigue, energy-level swings, and sugar cravings.

Kelly on the
Primal Blueprint
plan could wake up leisurely with the rest of the family and enjoy herself with comfortable exercise sessions (possibly including some of her less than optimally active family members?). Instead of suffering several mornings a week, she could pick her spots with high-intensity Breakthrough Workouts that leave her exhilarated and accelerate her fat reduction. In three months’ time, she’ll have shed nearly 24 pounds of body fat and likely have added a few pounds of well-placed, lean, toned muscle tissue. She’ll be happier and more energetic and she’ll look better than she has in decades, with less effort and less struggle than before.

Meanwhile, Kelly’s neighbor Wendy (remember her, the peppy network marketing enthusiast who dropped eight pounds in two weeks?) will almost assuredly weigh the same or more than she did when she started her cleansing diet six months prior. Furthermore, because 99 percent of network marketing participants lose money (from a survey of the largest and most reputed network marketing operations—after considering all expenses and inventory purchased from the company for resale), she’ll probably have a lot of cleansing diet kits gathering dust on the garage shelves.

As we reflect on the tidy examples of Ken and Kelly Korg nailing their daily caloric deficits with delicious, fulfilling meals, I must stress once again the concept of averages and expanding your timeline for measured progress out from a day or week to at least a month-by-month view. The meal diaries for Ken and Kelly obviously represent a good—make that perfect—day. In real life, your ability to optimize your meal choices and caloric intake will be more difficult than the examples (they were based on some of my own favorite meals!) printed here. I realize there will be days, and even longer periods, when you slip away from ideal.

However, you can get back on track and even make up ground easily because of the metabolic leverage you create with
Primal Blueprint
eating habits. When your insulin production is moderated and your fat metabolism is optimized, you have a greatly reduced need to snack or even eat regular meals. As you’ll see from my 72-hour personal journal sidebar in the next chapter, my own day-to-day caloric intake frequently varies by 250% or more! When your body has reprogrammed gene expression to be able to get energy from fat whenever it wants, hunger tends to subside, and blood sugar and energy levels stabilize. Why not tap into this new “skill” and take full advantage? You can not only easily make up lost ground when you slip a little, but you also accelerate the process of fat reduction to virtually whatever speed you want (up to the maximum mentioned previously) by engaging in a classic Primal strategy called
Intermittent Fasting
(I.F.).

Your choices of just when and how to practice I.F. should fit with your personality, lifestyle schedule, and unique habits and preferences. Both meticulous planners and spontaneous types can succeed with these varying styles. I suggest trying a mixture of unplanned meal skipping combined with structured fasts of 12 to 24 hours, or even longer for devoted and experienced fasters. There are few rules or strict guidelines to follow with I.F. Most readers will be well-served to simply break free of their habituation (does that sound nicer than “addiction”?) to regimented mealtimes and other cultural traditions, such as always having dessert after dinner, eating until you are stuffed, or freaking out if you skip a meal.

Numerous studies show that I.F. offers a multitude of benefits, including lowered blood pressure, improved insulin sensitivity and glucose uptake, loss of body fat (obviously), a decrease in oxidative damage, and even a kick start for tissue repair. These benefits are achieved when certain genes are “turned on” to repair specific tissues that would not otherwise be repaired in times of surplus. One could surmise that this genetic adaptation allows certain cells to live longer (as repaired cells) during famine because it’s energetically less expensive to repair a cell than to divide and create a new one. That might help explain some of the phenomenal longevity results produced by studies on animals
eating restricted-calorie diets. With mice, longevity continues to improve as calories are restricted by 10 percent, 20 percent, and even 50 percent of normal.

I.F. has also been shown in animal studies to reduce spontaneous cancers, possibly by decreasing oxidative damage or increasing immune response. Pockets of research around the globe strongly suggest that deregulated meal timing and generally moderated caloric intake produce many health benefits (particularly for those who are overweight) and promote longevity with virtually no negative side effects. How about that for an alternative to the zillion-dollar pharmaceutical and agricultural industries?

“Your body likes to be stimulated and challenged with brief
natural, positive
stressors that fine-tune gene expression and numerous other functions and evolutionary skills.”

Whatever method of caloric restriction you engage in, the net effect is to send signals to your genes to up-regulate fat burning and down-regulate glucose burning, as well as to turbocharge your body’s calorie processing system. It’s a similar dynamic to that invigorating feeling you get from a splash in cold water, an afternoon nap, or an intense workout. Your body likes to be stimulated and challenged with these brief
natural, positive
stressors that fine-tune gene expression and numerous other functions and evolutionary skills. In contrast, your body rebels and weakens from chronic
artificial
stressors such as jet travel, working long hours indoors, pushing through frequent, long, uncomfortable cardio workouts, or eating till you are full three times a day for your entire life. Here is a quick overview of some ways you can achieve I.F.:

Skipping Meals:
With heightened awareness, you may discover that you’re not always hungry when your regular mealtimes come around. Take advantage of this occasionally and skip a meal or two. You will learn to appreciate food even more when you use it to truly nourish and energize yourself, instead of habitually shoving stuff down the pipe just because it’s six o’clock or because everyone else is partaking at the alumni mixer.

Condensed Eating Window:
Condense your daily food intake into a set period of four to seven hours, based on your preferences. This allows for a sustained fasting period until the next day when you factor in sleep time.

Early and Late:
Enjoy an early-morning meal and a late-afternoon/early-evening meal. This is a good option for people who have stressful jobs or otherwise have difficulty carving out a relaxed time period for lunch in the middle of the day.

Planned Fast:
Enjoy dinner and then fast until the following evening (24 hours), or continue to fast until the next morning (about 36 hours). Many have success doing this once weekly. You may want to start by trying it once a month and work up to more frequently. For a deeper cleansing effect, you can try an occasional alternating day fast that lasts for a week. You can drink water, tea, or small amounts of juice on your fasting days and eat normally—or slightly less than normal—on your alternate days.

Regardless of what approach you use, be sure that you don’t overeat when your fast ends. After a skipped meal or fasting period, you will be especially attuned to your body’s hunger signals and satisfaction levels. Overeating is a largely psychological response to the anxiety of altering a familiar routine. Expert fasters typically ease out of their fast with several sparse meals to gently reengage the digestive system.

By seamlessly integrating I.F. into your
Primal Blueprint
eating routine, you will prove to your conscious brain that you can survive quite nicely without constantly needing food. This is easy to handle when you control insulin production with
Primal Blueprint
foods and really, really hard when you are entrenched in a typical American diet with lots of carbs and insulin highs and lows. If you have tried fasting or skipping meals in the past but (as with Kelly Korg) concurrently ate a diet moderate to high in carbs, you can likely relate to becoming irritable and exhausted when you miss even a single meal.

In my days as an endurance athlete, I burned so many calories (and relied so heavily on carbohydrate to repeatedly fill the glycogen stores I drained on a daily basis), I’d feel like I was on the verge of a hypoglycemic coma if I did so much as skip breakfast or otherwise failed to stuff my face several times a day. Now I marvel at how often I forget to eat—and the fact that doing so has no impact on my energy levels.

If you take a moment to reflect on the principles of evolution and homeostasis, it’s clear how messed up our modern eating culture is. It should not be this hard for humans to sustain daily energy levels and optimal body composition—we just make it hard by constantly pumping our bodies with foods that we are not adapted to eat. If you give I.F. a try while strictly observing
Primal Blueprint
food choices, I promise that you will experience this epiphany: that you are eating the way evolution designed you to (perhaps for the first time since you were an infant) and that it’s easy and fun and leads to incredible breakthroughs in fat loss and long-term weight management.

“Intermittent fasting is easy to handle when you control insulin production with Primal Blueprint foods and really, really hard when you are entrenched in a typical American diet”

If you are making a sincere effort to drop body fat with the
Primal Blueprint
and not satisfied with your results, here are some suggestions to alter your routine and issues to investigate further that might be tripping you up.

When you limit your carbs to 100 to 150 grams per day, you can pretty much maintain your weight and body composition indefinitely. You will probably even experience a gradual and sustained reduction of body fat if you come from eating a typical Western diet of double or triple that many carbs and carry a bit, or a lot, of excess fat.

However, if the fat is not coming off quickly enough after a month or two of Primal weight loss efforts, the best remedy is to tighten up the reins even further with your carbohydrate intake and stay in the sweet spot for several weeks.

While you may experience difficulty adjusting to the severe reduction of dietary “staples” (e.g., grains and pleasure foods including sweetened beverages and snacks), your body will quickly adapt to an eating style that is aligned with your genes. Yes, I know, getting your carbs down to 50 to 100 grams a day is easier said than done. It is on this issue that many people get stuck in the mode of “trying” to cut back instead of making a firm commitment to modify their habitual intake of certain foods and replace them with ample servings of foods that are more nutritious and technically more satisfying to your body than your favorite carb treats. For what it’s worth, paleo biologists believe Grok’s average daily intake of carbs was as low as 80 grams per day for months on end—and he thrived on that!

Keep in mind that there are days when you will go well above 100 or even 150 grams, thanks to the reality of prevalent carb choices and cultural traditions that can entice you away from a strict
Primal Blueprint
eating style. It will require great discipline to maintain an average of 50 to 100 grams (remember, most of us are accustomed to throwing down 300 grams per day or even more), but you only have to do it for a short time—say a month or two—depending on your starting point and how ambitious your goals are. By “great discipline” I’m not talking about suffering with a cloud of anguish and anxiety hanging over your head; it’s more like “Eat reasonably generous amounts of eggs, meat, chicken, fish, nuts, and seeds, plus all the vegetables you want and fruits (with a little bit of restraint and selectivity), and stay away from all grains and processed foods.”

If you find yourself struggling to meet your weight loss goals, I strongly recommend using an online food calculator to know exactly where you stand instead of “guesstimating.” I find the mere act of having to write down everything I eat for one, two, or five days increases my awareness of dietary habits and provides an effective check and balance against idle grazing or overeating when awareness is low. Chart everything
you eat for a few days and then enter the results at a site like
FitDay.com
or
TheDailyPlate.com
to get a truly accurate indication of where your carb intake is. Even today, with what I consider a pretty decent knowledge of the macronutrient content of many foods, I continue to be surprised at some of the results that the online calculators spit out when I input my data.

Body fat reduction simply doesn’t work well when you are skimping on sleep, working too hard, or experiencing high levels of emotional and psychological stress. Scientific research is validating the connection between things like lack of sleep and hormone irregularities that hamper fat metabolism or increase appetite. To succeed long-term with changing your body composition, you must have the time, energy, and patience to devote great attention and care to the topic. Rushing through meals or reaching for sweet foods when you are stressed is not aligned with the simple lifestyle of the
Primal Blueprint
.