It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

First off, thanks so much Mark! Your website has become a daily staple, and I really credit much of my own success to your teachings. It’s truly great to have found MDA!
Where to begin. I always ate carbs. Grew up eating a baguette every evening with dinner, which was almost always loaded with pasta. As an Italian, we loved pasta and bread. I actually wasn’t terrible with sweets until I got to and then left high school, but boy did I love them. During high school, […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

The dedication of my readers to maintain the Primal lifestyle through thick and thin never ceases to impress me. They fly halfway across the world just to go barefoot, eat turkey skin, crawl around on a jungle gym, and hunt for sandcrab carcasses in Oxnard, CA. They research, shop for, and eventually purchase entire chest freezers and then fill the interiors with cow, lamb, and pig pieces. And, if a slew of recent emails is indeed representative of the community at large, they’re deeply committed to eating Primally when traveling, on the road, camping, or in the middle of the ocean. (In the last week I’ve received emails from a band member, a truck driver, a backpacker, and a naval officer.) That’s great, and I’m happy to hear about the dedication, but they weren’t writing in for virtual pats on the back. They wanted cold, hard advice for staying dietarily […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

The issue of meal timing is a dense thicket of conflicting advice, a mix of conventional wisdom dispensed from USA Today articles, broscience on Internet forums, and confusing physiological feedback from a dysfunctional metabolism. How can one wade through it all and stay sane? You’ve been told your entire life that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but then you hear about intermittent fasting, Warrior Diets, and skipping breakfast while thriving. The buff/cut/shredded/ripped/insert-increasingly-violent-adjective-to-describe-one’s-leanness-here (what’s next, “flayed”?) dudes at the gym insist you should break up your eating into at least six small meals (and if possible, maintain a steady IV-drip of Muscle Milk throughout the day) to “boost” your metabolism. Some say three meals a day works just as well, while others say it’s even superior. Others try to simplify things. They suggest listening to your own body, to eat when hungry and fast when not, which makes sense, but […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

Fun story for you today:
Today at lunch time (around 2 pm) I was thinking out-load about what I was going to have for lunch.
…truthfully I was whining about my inability to make a decision
When I realized that I was taking the family out for dinner at 5, I decided to just grab a coffee.
To which a friend responded “Well, you should at least get a muffin to tide you over”
Here’s the interesting thing:
My ‘usual’ at Tim Horton’s (Coffee shop in Canada) is their Turkey Bacon Sandwich, listed on their website as having 37o Calories. For sake of argument we’ll round up to 400.
Now, here’s a list of some of their muffins:
Low-Fat Double Berry: 300
Banana Nut Muffin: 400
Blueberry Muffin: 350
Chocolate Chip Muffin: 400
Whole Grain Raspberry: 400
Caramel Chocolate Muffin: 500
So you see, a muffin is not a ‘tide you over’ kind of thing..it’s a meal. The coffee is the  ‘tide […]

Original post by Brad Pilon

I’ve written before about the benefits of going barefoot. Anatomically speaking, it’s the best thing you can do for your feet. Lately, however, I’ve been wading through a theory that suggests we have more to gain from ditching footwear than a more natural gait. In a book called Earthing, authors Clinton Ober, Martin Zucker and Dr. Stephen T. Sinatra put forth a bold proposal that body-to-earth contact has the power to directly impact our health. At the heart of their theory is a central physics-based relationship. Since the advent of shoes, houses, flooring, and elevated beds, we’ve lost our contact with the earth and its inherent electrical field. In discarding (or minimizing) this physical connection, we’re forgoing natural healing benefits that previously played a significant role in our physiological functioning. The body, when grounded in the earth, returns to its natural electrical homeostasis as part of the living electrical matrix. […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

How To Lose Fat In 4 Simple Steps
 
Losing fat is simple. I know that’s a bold claim, but there are only four steps involved in losing fat. I’ll even go as far as saying that these are the only four steps that work for fat loss. So with that grand introduction, let’s get to it. . .
 
1. Eat real food. In my opinion, real food consists of vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs, and nuts. And that’s about it. If you can’t eat it raw or cooked with nothing more than a pointy stick and an open flame, then you probably shouldn’t eat it if you want to lose fat. That means getting rid of the dairy, pasta, bread, rice, and beans. And it definitely means steering clear of any processed junk like cakes and cookies. Here’s another simple […]

Original post by admin

Seems better if I let all of you answer Jackie then for me to simply give her a sales pitch…
So if you have something to share, please leave a comment
Brad,
Help me out here. I love what you are saying about changing our attitudes and perspectives about food. I am not an ESE devotee, yet. I sounds so amazing and simple yet I am gun shy of shelling out yet more money (yes, I know, I have been duped!)and being duped again!
You “give away” a lot more info than most of the “other guys”, so your intentions seem honorable. Is this fasting thing going to give me headaches, lethargy and rude stomach noises? Will I be hearing voices of “forbidden” foods calling my name? And if I eat for the wrong reasons (I suspect most overweight people do) how do I control or […]

Original post by Brad Pilon

Folks can’t help but vilify meat. I mean, it has large amounts of animal fat, especially saturated fat. It requires the death of cute, fuzzy animals. It tastes good, almost offensively so. It’s “immodest” and “indulgent.” Oh, and even the good stuff – pasture-raised meat – displaces the local corn and soy populations and comes from animals that have the audacity to fart (enough, apparently, to bring about a global climate catastrophe). At least it gives people a nice opportunity to be smugly satisfied with themselves while displaying modest levels of indignation. Plus, it gives them a chance to talk about that Jonathan Safran Foer book. That’s always a good move at parties.
We Primal and paleo people, conversely, find meat to be an absolute delight, and most of us eat a decent amount of it. But questions do arise, as they will with any divisive subject:

Hi Mark
I’m having an intense […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

Complete 5 cycles:
10 Clean-the-Walls (5 clockwise, 5 counterclockwise)
15 Floor Scrubs
14 Trash Bag Tosses (7 each side)
30 Meter Petulant Child Carry

How-to:
Warmup: 30 second Grok Squat.
Common housework is interesting in that it forces you to interact with the world across multiple movement plane using various objects. You’re bending, squatting, reaching, making circular motions with your arms while balancing precariously on one foot to dust the spot you missed. We’ve all spied that one errant sock on the floor while hauling an armful of laundry to the washing machine, that mocking sock that we can’t help but try to retrieve (with a single finger or maybe our foot) without dumping the rest of the laundry. If that isn’t a comprehensive exploration of the ranges of natural human movement, I don’t know what qualifies.
So with that in mind, I put together a WOW based on common moves you might perform while doing housework. […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

The summer grilling season is upon us, which means we have a full-on craving for meat slathered in BBQ sauce and grilled to crispy, caramelized perfection. In anticipation of firing up the grill, we’ve been searching for the perfect BBQ sauce and a quick scan of the grocery store aisle confirmed exactly what we expected: if we wanted a perfect sauce, we were going to have to make it ourselves.
When we say “perfect” BBQ sauce, we mean one without high fructose corn syrup, loads of granulated sugar and other unnecessary ingredients like caramel color, modified food starch and preservatives. To avoid all of these things in BBQ sauce, you pretty much have to make it yourself. This didn’t deter our plans to grill. Making Primal BBQ sauce is quick and easy and can be made from ingredients many of us already have in our kitchen.

Our other requirement for a perfect […]

Original post by Worker Bee