Last week a friend of Carrie’s was over for a visit, and I overheard a bit of their conversation while I was in the kitchen. She’s a new mother with all the stresses and string of obligations that come with it. On Saturday she’d gone for a massage – a gift Carrie had given her some months ago at her baby shower. She’s normally a very relaxed, low-key kind of person, but she was surprised at how much she had changed in the course of a few months. “It took me half way through the massage,” she said, “just to stop all the mind chatter – the list making, the reminders, the planning, the questions that never seem to stop running through my head these days.” She was finally able to let go after the therapist worked out some of the shoulder knots. “By the time she started on the […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

The hallowed halls of the Academy of Broscience contain untold tomes of knowledge, wisdom, and recipes for “sick” pump stacks. Over the years, their scholars have elucidated the arcane esoterica of muscle confusion, thereby making it palatable for the layman. They discovered that any gram of carbohydrate eaten after dusk turns immediately to fat, and that curling in the squat rack engages more muscle fibers than curling elsewhere. Their field researchers are reportedly close to confirming the existence of spot reduction. But perhaps their greatest contribution to modern physical culture has been the establishment of the unassailable fact that muscle burns fifty times more calories than fat, at fifty calories per pound per day. (Even Dr. Oz says it, so it must be true.) As they have so painstakingly shown, adding twenty pounds of muscle increases your resting metabolic rate by 1000 calories. With that kind of leeway, you could […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

Impulsivity – If you want to give a name to what ails us, this is it. It’s the root cause of obesity and debt for most people. At it’s extreme it’s what leads to financial ruin, the destruction of families, and obliteration of health.
It is action without thinking, or even action that has overridden thinking… almost as if we’ve been driven to do something. It is giving into selfish desires without taking fully into account its possible consequences to the individual or the family/community.
In the world of consumerism, this is how you want to train your consumer to act. You want them to be as impulsive as possible.
Just do it.
Just Buy it.
Just Eat it.
Just think of the example of the super-market check-out. Most people do not go to a supermarket to get the gum or candy at the checkout isle…but they do go home with it.
Learned Impulsivity at it’s best.
Granted, […]

Original post by Brad Pilon

Have you ever had wagyu beef? Wagyu is the breed of cattle from which the infamous kobe beef is derived: highly marbled, impossibly tender. I mean, this stuff is ridiculous. I’ve had wagyu steak that you could cut with your fork, no knife required. It can actually be too melt-in-your-mouth tender for me. I’m not saying I like meat tough and stringy, but I like to know I’m actually eating something’s muscle tissue. At PrimalCon 2011, the wagyu steaks were grass-fed, grilled perfectly, and not overly tender or excessively marbled. Just great. I suspect they were a wagyu-angus crossbreed, which is true for most wagyu raised in the US. I can get behind wagyu like that.
So why am I talking about wagyu beef (why not?) and what does all have to do with “human interference factor”? Well, last week I happened across an interesting science story in a newspaper. It […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

If you weren’t at UCLA this weekend for the Ancestral Health Symposium, you really missed out on the brainiest, brawniest, most physically and mentally impressive gathering I’ve been witness to. My hat’s off to the organizers (and my friends), Aaron Blaisdell and Brent Pottenger, and all the presenters and volunteers who made it happen. It went more smoothly than I’ve ever seen a conference of this magnitude go – and this was the inaugural one! I’m looking forward to the future and I’ve got a good feeling that this weekend will prove to be a powerful milestone in the story of the movement. All the presentations were filmed. I’ll alert you when they become available.
Let’s get to the questions. I field a Marcona almond query, discuss the unpalatability of raw olives, explain my stance on grass-fed whey protein, and lambast Carbquik.

Hi Mark,
I hear a lot about how almonds are good […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

Leave it to the French to create a dish that tastes and looks incredibly gourmet even though it’s made from not much more than ground meat. Making pâté de terrine does not take extraordinary culinary skills or exotic ingredients, but the results are impressive and extraordinarily delicious. Well-seasoned, fatty meat is combined with egg, whole cream and brandy for added richness and flavor and then – this might just be our favorite part – the whole thing is wrapped in bacon. Once the pâté de terrine has been baked and then chilled, it’s sliced thinly and served with mustard and cornichons (that’s French for gherkin) on the side.

As the name suggests, pâté de terrine (often shortened to just “terrine”) is pate that has been baked in a container called a terrine, which is basically a long, thin loaf pan. If a terrine sounds familiar even though you aren’t well-versed in […]

Original post by Worker Bee

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!

My story starts long before I had kids, even before I got married. I struggled with my weight as soon as I started college. It was always a game of gaining weight all school year and then losing some of it during the summer. On and on that cycle went.
I met my wonderful husband, Mike, after I finished college and came to find out that he too had been struggling with his weight for a long time. He even joined Weight Watchers when he was 19.
During […]

Original post by Mark Sisson

I’ve got play on the mind today, folks. It’s mid-week, yes, but there’s something more to it. This week I’m presenting on play at the Ancestral Health Symposium in Los Angeles. It promises to be a great event, and I’m looking forward to being among so many like-minded folks – experts and laypeople alike. I’ve talked about play now and then on Mark’s Daily Apple. I’ve even done a definitive guide for it, but that hardly means I’ve closed the book. As with most things in life, time and experience have a way of revealing new angles, deeper layers, and unforeseen connections. Our need for play is likewise continuous and complex – and the likely roots of our inclination are not what you’d expect.

Experts have long studied the benefits of play for children, and the evolutionary logic is pretty transparent. Play undoubtedly honed practical skills like hunting, cooking, building, and […]

Original post by Mark Sisson