It’s December 31, the last day of the 2000s. It’s always fun, and often quite moving, at times like these to take a look back and remind ourselves how far we’ve come, to recall where and what we were and how and why we are different now. These exercises can seem a little cheesy, but I think they’re quite useful. Some change comes so gradually that you hardly recognize it’s occurring at all. With a little self-reflection you can acknowledge that real change has occurred, be proud of it and own it, and then commit to further personal growth.
I was inspired by this Mark’s Daily Apple forum thread. In it forum user bonesheal asked, “What did YOU learn this year?” Seeing that Mark’s Daily Apple may have played a small part in raising the consciousness of the people that responded makes the experiment that is MDA all worth it. I […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

It’s a familiar image we might attribute to stereotype: a sluggish, maybe portly individual lying prostrate on the couch, his/her front littered with Dorito crumbs. Could there, however, be truth behind the picture? Is there indeed a connection between incessant snacking and chronic slothdom? Or considered another way, is there a connection between fasting and being active? As a long-time fan of intermittent fasting (and a believer in the research behind it), I’m convinced. A study out this month sheds even more light on the relationship between lethargy and continuous eating.

For decades now, conventional wisdom has told us that we should eat regularly throughout the day to keep our blood sugar steady. With three regular meals and at least two snacks, we’re counseled to keep our bodies in a perpetual postprandial state. However, newer research, including this month’s study from ETH Zurich, questions this assumption. Scientists focused on the opposing […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

The basis of Tabata Training is 4 minutes of intense interval training/circuit training. What you are doing is taking an exercise we'll use sprints as an example here.
Sprint as hard as you can for 20 seconds
Walk for 10 seconds
Repeat 7 more times for a total of 8 sets.
So what you have is a total of 4 minutes workout time.
Tabata Training can be done with a number of different exercises the idea is to use an exercise that gets the whole body involved or at least the major muscle groups.Tabata Training can be done with Barbells, Dumbells, Kettlebells or just Bodyweight exercises. I'll give you some other exercises and routines to try in a minute but first let me give you some background and how Tabatas work.
Tabata Training was developed by Izumi Tabata (imagine that) at the National Institute of Fitness and Sports in Tokyo, Japan. They did a study on […]

Original post by WP-AutoBlog Import

New Years is almost here, and for a lot of people, that means making resolutions that they know they’re not going to stick to. But if you’re one of the people reading this site (and you are!) then there’s no reason you can’t fulfill your resolutions this year. Here are 3 simple tips to make your New Years resolutions come true, no matter what they are:
1. Don’t get psyched about them. The #1 reason people don’t fulfill their resolutions for the new year, in my opinion, is because they allow themselves to get psyched out about it. When you first make your resolution, your excitement about what you’re setting out to do takes over. You have the whole year ahead of you and you figure you can accomplish whatever you want to accomplish.
What happens after the initial stage of excitement is you start getting intimidated. You set some really big […]

Original post by rafael@thefitnessadviser.com (Rafi Bar-Lev)

Ideally, The Primal Blueprint is a living, breathing document. Whether it’s emails from insightful readers or random articles from my RSS feed casting a subject in a completely different light, or even personal N=1 revelations spurring a meticulous re-examination of previously-held stances, I’ll often find myself rethinking certain aspects of the PB. They usually hold up pretty well, mind you, but it’s always good to take stock of the evidence. It keeps us in the Primal community on our toes. Take yesterday’s post, for example. The discovery of grain residue from a 100,000 year old dig site was undoubtedly intriguing, because it suggested that a major tenet of the Primal lifestyle – that grains have no place in the human diet – might need some refining. In the end, our position remained the same (the intense labor inherent in the sourcing, gathering, hulling, processing, and cooking of grass seeds would […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

You feel hungry.
You eat.
You feel full
You stop eating.
.
This is how it’s supposed to work.
Unfortunately, our bodies don’t always work the way we want them to.
Sometimes,we feel an intense desire to eat (and eat and eat) even when we are full
And why is that?
According to researchers, one of our appetite hormones – Ghrelin, can trick our brains into making us eat “pleasurable” foods even when we are full.

Previous research has shown that elevated levels of ghrelin is linked to the “reward” aspects of eating.
According to researcher Dr. Jeffrey Zigman, rewards can “generally be defined as things that make us feel better”.
“They give us sensory pleasure, and they motivate us to work to obtain them,” he said. “They also help us reorganize our memory so that we remember how to get them.”

In this recent study, researchers looked for an answer to why someone who is already is driven to eat that high-calorie […]

Original post by healthhabits

The Primal Blueprint, as our good readers know, is founded on the principle of evolutionary nutrition. In short, what our long time ancestors ate during the course of 100,000+ years, we’re still designed to eat. This 100,000 years of hunting and gathering, from a physiological standpoint, trumps the comparatively short 10,000 or so years since the Agricultural Revolution, when humans commenced widespread farming practices and prepared grains as a significant part of their diet.
An article published in this month’s Science Magazine presents archeological evidence that, according to its author, challenges this accepted timeline. A number of readers have written me about this story. Here’s one letter among the bunch….
Mark,
Please help me make some sense to this: Stone Age diet included processed grains

I’m a crossfitter in Colorado and most of the gym keeps a Grok diet and are confused about this article. Does this open the door to other minimally […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

Everyone knows Christmas is a great time for cheesecake. And I’m a cheesecake master.
Master at eating it, that is. Do not click pic if prone to cravings.

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Original post by noreply@blogger.com (Martin Berkhan)