Dude, live on rice and soy sauce for a week and report back. Fifty bucks says you’ll be a nervous wreck.
Clayton, excellent. I would add that, from experience, I believe that a relevant (valid) transformation starts with/in the mind. The body then follows. A mind in the right state is able to listen to the body as to what its true needs are. A mind in sync with its body knows exactly when and what to eat and do (walk, run, hike, swim, sit, sleep, etc.). It’s amazing how hunger cravings, aches, and pangs disappear when food is not used to fill the place of something perceived to be missing by an unbalanced mind. The biggest problem in today’s ADD society is that people (their minds) are unable to listen to their own bodies. I strongly recommend moderation, meditation, and contemplation about where happiness comes from.
“If you realize that all things change,
there is nothing you will try to hold on to.
If you aren’t afraid of dying,
there is nothing you can’t achieve.
Trying to control the future
is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place.
When you handle the master carpenter’s tools,
chances are that you’ll cut your hand.”
“Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plats are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.
The hard and stiff will be broken.
The soft and supple will prevail.”
From “Tao Te Ching” - Lao Tzu
I hope this made sense.
My priorities aren’t in the right place to pull that off yet, but I’ll add in some other factors: rice, soy sauce, alcohol, and meditation. I bet I can pull that off for a week.
Obviously an insanely disciplined person. But that’s the difference with Primal lifestyle… it’s not about discipline (except the rather minor discipline required to not eat trash-food) and performance of feats, it’s about being healthy and relaxed.
I work at a major corporation. When I walk out past the gym at 6:30pm, I see all the early birds (whose cars are in the parking lot before mine no matter how early I show up) sweating like pigs on treadmills and ellipticals so they can go home, have a tiny, high-carb dinner that barely satisfies their raging hunger, crash into bed only to repeat. This kind of behavior is the kind of soft servitude that people learn to love that Aldous Huxley spoke of.
I grew up in a rural area, I was homeschooled, so this is all very alien to me. I’ve worked a job where I had to wake at 4am, another job where I had to be in great physical shape in order to climb a tall building, etc. These jobs required discipline but none of them required this bizarre self-flagellation. For me, it is obvious that willingly inflicting more suffering on myself is not the answer.
So, I’m not interested in eating a raw or nearly-raw, all-vegetable diet and then hitting the gym daily to do weight-training on selective muscle groups so I can look like that. I want to look good naked but I want to do it (and I know it’s achievable) without self-punishment. Being healthy should feel good and shouldn’t entail privation or heroic exertion.
Clayton -
Yeah, I think that “listening to my body” is what I’ve neglected. Until about age 24, I was in either excellent or good shape, never more than a 10 pounds overweight and I “looked good naked.” After that, something changed and I started going downhill. At some points, I’ve literally felt like I’m going insane; agitated, unsatisfied (unsatisfiable), uncomfortable and generally unhappy all the time for no reason. I knew some of it had to do with sleep, so I worked on sleeping right for a while. That helped but it didn’t fix the problem… I was still fundamentally unhappy.
So, as a result of circumstances, I’ve come to realize that what I am eating and how I spend my free time must be the problem. It’s all that’s left after eliminating all other variables. I distinctly remember the feeling, when I was younger, of “listening to my body.” I could look at a luscious piece of chocolate cake and just literally feel too full to eat it. But it’s been so long since the last time I felt that inner voice telling me what to do.
I’ve been doing the primal thing for about 12 days now and I’m feeling good. I’ve dropped 6 pounds and my gut has gone down visibly in size quite a bit. It really is amazing how quickly your body can “reprogram” itself. Another 30 pounds and I will be back in the best shape I was ever in and I’m looking forward to it big time.
I’ll confess another motivation. When I was a kid, I was a stomach sleeper. Everyone thought I was nuts but whatever, that is what felt like the most comfortable way for me to sleep, so that’s how I usually slept. It’s been probably 7 years since I could sleep on my stomach. I can’t wait to get rid of this gut and get back to being able to fall asleep on my stomach again. For all you non-stomach sleepers, I don’t know what’s the matter with you, but it’s just heaven.
Nice Lao Tzu quote, I do get it.
Clayton -
Primal snack I just tried, was really great. In a small bowl or shallow cup:
- 4-6 green, pimiento-stuffed olives
- 2 or 3 tsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 tsp chopped, raw garlic
- pepper to taste
Scoop up each olive with some olive oil and chopped garlic from the pool under the olives.
Clayton -
Clayton,
I did some “paleo” diet about 2 years ago for almost 3 months. I ended losing 55 pounds. (240 to 185) I’ve been eating like crap since and I’m at about 200 pounds now and pretty steady. Prior to all this, my metabolism was screwed and I wasn’t eating enough red meat.
I followed the advice Kurt had put up at that point in time: http://www.archevore.com/ I’d read his site in chronological order from oldest posts to newest posts. It helps you follow his reasoning, and why he doesn’t see bananas, carbs, and rice crispies as evil as he used to.
Kurt identifies as an austro-libertarian as well, so it helps me trust his reasoning on science. 
There aren’t many doctors out there that have a handle on epistemology as well as he does.
To lose fat as fast as possible and remain eating healthy, i’d suggest a 4-fold approach that I followed:
Intermittent fasting - get your insulin sensitivity up and allow for longer periods of low blood-insulin which allows lipolosis
Ketogenic - maybe a few months, but not too long term. It also helps with insulin sensitivity, and having a high-fat diet will help in becoming a fat-burning machine
Primal - nothing processed nor agricultural. I drank cream and cooked with butter, but avoided dairy otherwise. Other than that, I ate nothing that was invented in the past ~10,000 years.
Low reward - this means eating only 3 things a meal, at most. I didn’t do it on purpose, but out of convenience. After the fact, Stephen Guynet started doing some research on how “the bodyfat set point” would be affected by how much we please our palette: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/
Good luck on your efforts!
This is good but if you want to be fully healthy I’d suggest trying out a real H/G lifestyle and spend a day or two in the woods hunting and gathering for real. I gather but I don’t hunt since meat is poison. Human beings evolved to eat wild plants raw. There is a ton of evidence to support the idea that eating meat came AFTER ag.
Fixed.
Thanks for the wishes, Joe. I’ve realized it’s not just about weight. I want to be in great shape again and stay in great shape as I age so life is comfortable and enjoyable - like so I can sleep on my stomach.
As far as rewarding the palate, I’m not able to evaluate that at this point. I’m going to drop the weight and get exercising and sleeping right first, then I’ll start experimenting with “breaking the rules” with what Mark terms sensible vices. I think that it’s important to realize that human beings have adapted a bit in the last 10,000 years so individual sensitivity to certain kinds of foods varies. For example, I’ve acquired a lactose-intolerance at the age of 31; a lot of people are lactose-intolerant their whole lives after weaning and some people never become lactose-intolerant. I can eat small amounts of dairy with a lactase pill but I try to take it easy because I figure that my body is telling me “no” for a reason.
My recent discovery of Epicureanism is helping me with this. “What is good is easy to get” is one of Epicurus’ maxims… it is easy to be satisfied with your food, you just have to re-adjust your relationship with the food. Eating is a way to bring in the best nutrients you can get your hands on in the tastiest way you can manage to prepare them. All diversions from this state of affairs have consequences… consuming nutritionless carbs (such as grains), consuming vegetable-oil soaked and toxin-infused junk foods, consuming excess alcohol, etc. Of course, you can choose to indulge a little and bear the consequences when you feel that the short-term enjoyment is worth the negative effects. But when your mind and body are dulled by a low-fat diet, anti-nutrients in grain, lack of sleep and sedentariness that deprive you of the ability to even sense the positive or negative effects of your choices, you are “flying blind” and I now see this is where I have been for the last 7 years now.
I was healthy and in-shape my whole life until about age 24, then things started going down hill. I could tell that I wasn’t listening to my body… or that my body had been “muted” somehow and was not correctly telling me what it needed, like it used to. But I didn’t understand why. Now I know. When I left home, my diet changed and it was a typical, carb-heavy, low-fat diet. After a while, I realized there was a problem and began experimenting with low-carb diets but to little avail. I’d lose 10-15 pounds and then the moment I stopped going to the gym every day, it would pile right back on and sometimes a few pounds extra. If I missed a meal even by 15 minutes, I’d get that back-of-the-head hunger headache.
So, this primal way of thinking about health really clicks with me… on a scientific level (evolution), on a philosophical level (Epicurus) and on an experimental level; I used to feel great, eat what I liked and work out only erratically and moderately. I wake up in the morning and cook some delicious bacon and eggs without feeling like “well, the protein’s good, but the fat is going to give me a heart attack one day.” No, the fat is not going to give me a heart attack. Spiking my insulin up and down with grain-based carbs all day will store fat, decrease activity and bring on the stages of deteriorating health that inevitably lead to heart disease… that’s what will give me a heart-attack one day.
Breaking that cycle with delicious, nutritious foods cooked in animal fats and the safe vegetable fats (e.g. olive oil) will bring needed nutrients into my body, satisfy my hunger and my palate, keep my weight at its natural level, give me energy to play and move when I need to and make me look good naked.
I particularly like the primal way of thinking about exercise and how well it fits with Epicureanism. Look, our ancestors were insanely fit but they really weren’t gym rats, finding a flat spot in the savanna to do sit-ups and push-ups while lifting rocks like barbells. If they didn’t need to move, they didn’t move except to play. So, they moved when they needed to (the pain of moving was less than the pain of going hungry) and they moved to play (the act of moving to play is pleasurable in itself).
The modern conception of the gym is purgatorial. You go there to pay for your daily sins at the table. This is insanity. How can people live that way? Even the Greeks - the inventors of the gymnasium - didn’t use it that way. The gym wasn’t for immoderates trying to keep their waistline from exploding, it was for athletes who wanted to compete in public games… where they would usually compete naked. Hence “look good naked.” The adult human who is eating a diet rich in nutrition should be able to look good naked with a very minimal amount of exertion.
My goal is to reach 210 (I hope I can lose this 10 pounds in the next 3-4 weeks) and then sign up for Judo classes again. With less weight and better health, I believe I’ll be able to take the trauma much better. In addition, I may study Tai Chi Chuan and Ginastic Natural (on my own, I’m not going to pay someone to teach me that, sorry) to augment Judo classes. Unlike a lot of people, I really hate running. I mean, I hate hate hate running. Maybe some humans have those “persistence hunting” genes and others don’t… I certaintly don’t. Even when I was in my best shape, I hated to run not because I couldn’t do it but because it just feels pointless, boring and painful on the feet, knees, hips, leg muscles, etc. The advantage of running is that it’s cardio without a lot of skill required. But I like the feeling of doing something that requires a little skill, so some gentle calisthenics would be a good substitute for me.
Clayton -
I can’t add much to your post, Clayton. I agree that there are things which vary from person to person and I realize it’s also a health thing. Getting away from processed food, intermittent fasting, and getting good sleep really cleared up my mind and let me focus on tasks for hours on end.
As for exercise, I’d also suggest trying some of the “barefoot running” techniques. For the longest time, I had soreness in my patellar ligaments, and running in this fashion actually helped to eliminate the problem! (For this specific problem of the patellar ligaments, I suggest getting cod liver oil, vitamin D, stretching quads, activating gluts and strengthening hamstrings.)
Is olive oil primal? It’s made by processing a plant, no?
Also is primal different from paleo?
Fixed.
What’s wrong with rewilding?
That McDougall guy is rather disingenuous. First of all, he contradicts himself by stating outright that early humans did in fact hunt. They didn’t hunt and they did hunt. Which is it, Dr. McDougall? Second, he tries to revise the date of the agricultural revolution back 40,000 years to 50kya. Well, there is clearly room for variation depending on how you define the agricultural revolution but the mainstream sets it at around 10kya. In any case, even if it were 50kya, that wouldn’t change the essential primal dietary argument: anatomically modern humans were HG for the vast majority of their evolutionary history since emerging on the scene 200-300kya.
He simply repeats the main thesis of primal dietary theory: civilization has been built on the calories made available from grains. The point of primal diet is that this was done despite the consequences to our digestive tract! Our ancestors faced a stark choice: Eat grains and keep up with the Joneses or go back to the Savanna and risk being eaten by wild animals. So, they ate grains. And they got sick. In fact, they got sicker and sicker the more grains they ate and the more animals they domesticated (being exposed to new disease vectors).
And he also inadvertently spells out the solution. The Pharaohs could afford to feed some of their grain to animals so they did (why did they prefer to eat animals to grain???) Nowadays, we have tractors and industrial farming equipment that permits us to produce massive amounts of vegetative nutrients very inexpensively. Why not convert some of these corn and wheat fields to hay fields and pasture and start growing a little more free-range, grass-fed livestock?
Of course, this will require a shift in the demand curves of the public but that’s exactly the point in primal criticism of the FDA and USDA. These agencies and the ecosystem of Establishment universities and lobbies surrounding them are heavily invested in making people believe that what they really want is more corn and wheat. We’re not cows, we shouldn’t eat like cows and we don’t need to eat like cows, at least, those of us who are not at a 3rd-world level of poverty. In fact, we shouldn’t even be feeding this stuff to cows, that’s how bad it is. The health consequences of a grain-based diet are massive and as far as I’m concerned it’s a big cover-up.
If grains are really so good for you, why are all those breakfast cereals “fortified”? I thought they were bursting with “heart-healthy” nutrition?? It’s all a sham. Grass is probably the oldest form of life to exist on land. It has been fending off consumption by animals for maybe a billion years. A cow requires a large, energy-intensive digestive system (seven stomachs) to properly digest it. And even cows don’t eat seeding grass. You don’t think grass knows how to defend itself?
Clayton -
Dog. Carnivore. Look at stomach and intestines.
Cow. Herbivore. Look at stomachs and intestines. (if you can point them out)
Human. Omnivore. Look at stomach and intestines.
Humans. Not quite cows, not quite dogs.
Some counterpoint: http://www.jonbarron.org/weight-loss/paleo-diet-review-good-bad Further in-depth analysis on what people ate long ago and how to compensate for modern-world conditions: http://www.beyondveg.com/
Some counterpoint: http://www.jonbarron.org/weight-loss/paleo-diet-review-good-bad Further in-depth analysis on what people ate long ago and how to compensate for modern-world conditions: http://www.beyondveg.com/
Yes. To reiterate myself human beings are natural raw vegans. There’s a TON of evidence that eating meat only came after ag in human history. H/Gs were really just vegan gatherers which is what I hope to be. I’m already eating nothing but raw veggies and raw fruits/berries and raw nuts for my protein. I also only drink extremely filtered water to get all the fluoride (poison) out. As soon as I finish teaching myself the skills I’ll start gathering my food from the wild.
Remember that H/Gs lived active lifestyles. They weren’t couch potatos like us. Read Zerzan if you want more insights. I don’t agree w/ Zerzan’s anti-property and semi-statist views but his stuff on H/Gs and how civ turned us bad is legit.
I do question the role of meat in our diet in history. One could say a certain group of people were hunter gatherers 10,000 years ago, or even 5,000 years ago, but easily with the exception of the past 100 years for the past 2,000 (for Europeans) it’s been more agriculture than meat consumption. On another forum a topic came up of meat consumption during Medieval times and it wasn’t that likely, if anything eating meat was reserved for festivals and celebrations, and not in daily consumption at all. Even then it still depends on those populations, in Scandinavia fish was consumed more than red meat, for red meat it would either be horse or boar. In India goat meat is consumed the most as far as red meat goes.
Read the BeyondVeg site. It pretty well obliterates veganism.