UPDATE: Martha and I are going to try the Primal approach. Well, I *am* going to be a bit serious about it and Martha *says* she will. We’ll see how it plays out!
In short, we’re going to eat fewer carb’s and sugars and more meat, fat and non-starchy veggies. We’re not going nuts about it, but we’ll drop pasta, rice and beans meals and grain-type breakfasts. Lots more salads. We’re salad crazy around here anyway.
Our scheme is slightly conflicting with Lucy’s newly planned role in life as a Baker, but she’s more about the baking than the eating anyway.
As regards the Primal aspect of exercise: we’ll try that, too. More sprints and dyno weights. Maybe I’ll get a kettlebell.
In short (again) the Primal Blueprint means eating and exercising like a caveman, the way our bodies evolved. Grain eating is recent for humans. Hard aerobic exercise (2+ hours at 70%) is also recent. Cavemen did mellow exercise AND superintense — not much hard-moderate.
The downside or hard-aero sport is high levels of cortisol in the blood — very corrosive and harsh on the immune. I’m getting too many colds and injuries. I need to build my immune and structure.
The perk of eating cave-style is less fat on the body. Eating carbs/sugars boosts blood insulin which lays on the fat.
On with the previous, longwinded report on this stuff…
***
[Bump from 3/09.] There’s a new top fitness guru out there with a message that’s catching on and, well, it makes sense to me in a variety of ways because it’s what I’ve been preaching as well. Of course, it’s presented lots better and scientifically and all.
He’s Mark Sisson and he used to be a top triathlete, then he was in the bigtime anti-doping administration, now he’s been exploring what was happening with all that and how to avoid the interconnected downsides he ran into in those scenes. He’s finally sorted it all out and has a book coming out.
He’s pushing the “Primal Way.”
He seems like a friendly guy so I’ll call him Mark. Mark says the standard health and fitness approaches, as well as standard outdoor sports methods, all resulted in illness, injury and fast aging. Top athletes use illegal drugs to try to avoid some of those downsides while still using the basic wrong approach.
He says people evolved over jillions of years to live a certain main way and it’s not the grains way nor is it the hours of mid-range training effort way.
He’s sorted out ten laws in the way we evolved to live: Eat Lots of Plants, Animals and Insects; Avoid Poisonous Things; Move Frequently At A Slow Pace; Lift Heavy Things; Run Really Fast Once In A While; Get Adequate Sleep; Play; Get Plenty of Sunlight; Avoid Stupid Mistakes; and Use Your Brain.
Now, it might be noted that cavemen maybe didn’t live all that long either. But the flipside was that if cavemen were successful enough once they got over a certain age-hump they perhaps did live quite long. We do know, of course, about the lifestyles of folks who commonly lived very actively into the 100+ range in our own era so we can perhaps learn from them as well in this overall lesson.
It might also be noted that we can use our diets in a living process of elevating ourselves rather than primalizing. But I note that Mark’s Primal process uses fasting which is also a key to higher living. So I’d think low can be high. Simple food is also commonly part of higher living. For instance, veggies in some traditions don’t avoid meat just because it’s healthier but because it’s part of their own moral efforts (which of course they never try to foist on others…).
Anyway, I like Mark’s idea that his favorite caveman Grok and his family lived a mellow active life until such times as they had to be ready to spring into intense action. They didn’t do much at 80% effort. It was 90% of the day at 10% effort…and 10% at 110%.
It seems like the Primal Way is into the full range of realistic motion for cavemen. Mark pushes intense sprinting and intense weight lifting and then mellow strolling. But! These intense sessions are also SHORT. He’s found you can make the biggest, healthiest gains with short, intense workouts. He gives some interesting stats to back this up: the Tabata Sprints, in particular. A Japanese coach did research that concluded that a 4 minute workout of intense 20-second sprints with 5 minute warmup and cooldown produced the best results.
Mark noted that enduro athletes as a rule suffer from aero-ailments: they get lots of colds. Hours of 80% jam-cruising lowers the immune. They also can’t keep up body mass, upper body in particular. Hard aerobic burns eat up muscle.
He’s a fan of fat-burning and fat eating. No more carbo loading.
He’s not that big on enduro events either. Sigh.
He mentions the neglected role of cortisol in illness and how aero workouts really raise these levels. Burning carbs in a strong aero fire also unleashes corrosive oxidants throughout your system.
He mentions the misinterpreted role of cholesterol.
Interesting stuff!
Anyway, OYB has long been about a quick, diverse workout via my “Backyard Olympics” concept that covers all the bases and includes sprints and mobility training and bone-density boosting (ax-chopping and heavy-bag action). I do about 20 fun activities full-blast in a half hour. I do that a couple weeks and WOW.
I recall an old Utne Reader magazine cover headline that provoked me along these lines: “Fit for What?” I decided I enjoyed outdoor sport but that I always wanted to be *fit for life.*
I wanted to be able to help push a car out of the snow and to be able to shovel my drive, rake my yard, hoe my garden, bike for errands, do household carpentry, and carry someone who’s hurt. Diverse self defense skills seem good, too. I also want to be able to be outside cruising along doing something all day for a few days in a row, too, camping on the ground. Bike, boat, hike, ski.
When winter rolls around I always get hungry for meat. I’m upping the exercise for XC skiing with more allbody action and trail-maintenance and firewood cutting. I also start noticing all the fresh roadkill deer around. I’ve started putting two and two together more often. What a taste treat! (“Field & Stream” magazine interviewed a top chef who says venison tops beef in almost any classic recipe. He put it this way: Venison, it’s the Other Red Meat.)
Fun stuff!
https://www.marksdailyapple.com/what-is-the-primal-blueprint/
