The A-to-Z Guide to Leading a Primal Lifestyle

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Print this out. Bookmark it. Send it to friends who don’t quite get the Primal thing. Consider this a valuable resource for all-things Primal. It’s a nice, alphabetical encapsulation of what it means to lead a Primal lifestyle. It’s not everything, of course. You can always dig deeper into the details, but this summary gives a high-level look at just about everything.

Without further ado, I present The A-to-Z Guide to Leading a Primal Lifestyle.

Avoid chronic cardio. I spent about half my life running (and later, with triathlons, swimming and cycling) myself into the ground. I thought the more miles I could log, the healthier I’d be. That’s the mindset many people have, and it’s absolutely wrong. Running a ten-miler is different than running a ten-miler every day. We have the capacity to go long distances and even outlast wild animals upon which we’re preying. We don’t have the capacity to do that every single day without consequences to our health. Run long distances if you love it, compete if you love competing, but know the cost it incurs.

Barefoot is best. We’re born barefoot. Kids who are allowed to go barefoot or wear non-constrictive shoes grow up with excellent foot health because their feet grow naturally. They don’t need arch support because they develop their own built-in arches. They have lower rates of flat footedness. And perhaps most importantly, being barefoot allows a person to utilize the vast array of nerves, muscles, and connective tissue to experience the world underneath them—a rich world of which shoe-wearers are mostly ignorant.

Chronic stress is to be avoided. Before the advent of traffic jams, nagging bosses presiding over soul-sucking jobs, credit card debt, and other ceaseless sources of unpleasantness, most sources of stress were punctuated and acute. That’s the environment in which our physiologies, nervous systems, and adrenal responses evolved: one of acute stressors. We simply can’t handle a steady load of stress without suffering, which is why chronic stress is linked to heart disease, hypertension, overeating, and a host of other health conditions.

Ditch grains, refined sugar, and processed seed oils. They’re low in nutrients (and in the case of sugar and oils, completely bereft of them), high in toxins, and represent empty sources of carbohydrates and bad fat. And it’s not just that these foods were unavailable to humans for most of our history. That’s just the jumping off point for the hypothesis. It’s that modern science has identified refined grains, sugar, and seed oils as particularly deleterious to our health.

Expose yourself to stressors. If chronic stress is a historically unprecedented physiological insult that impairs our immune, mental, and physical health, acute stressors train our body to rise up to meet stress and grow stronger. Almost anything can be quantified in terms of stress. Exercise is a stressor. Too much exercise without adequate rest is a chronic stressor, but the right dose of exercise famously increases strength, builds muscle, and improves fitness. Other stressors include anything that takes you out of your comfort zone, that displaces your sense of homeostasis. Cold water (take the plunge), cold weather, learning a new skill from scratch.

Fat is good for you. Decades of health experts and government officials telling us to eat less fat—especially arteryclogging guidesaturated fat—has given us sky high obesity rates. So instead of trimming fat off your steaks, buying non-fat dairy, eating margarine instead of butter, fearing nuts and avocados and olive oil, you’ll have much better luck (and better-tasting meals) embracing healthy, natural fats found in animals, fruits (like coconuts, avocados, and olives), and fish.

Get sun exposure. Spending our days cloistered inside is a historical aberration. We’re meant to be outside, exposed to the sun from time to time. Full spectrum sun exposure promotes the production of vitamin D (a pro hormone responsible for hundreds of important physiological functions and health effects), nitric oxide (which maintains and improves endothelial function and blood flow), and happiness (which is tough to quantify but who doesn’t feel better after being in the sun?). Plus, getting full sunlight in the morning and afternoon helps establish a natural, healthy circadian rhythm. You shouldn’t burn yourself. You don’t need to suntan or “lay out.” But smart, sensible, moderate amounts of sun are far better for your health than avoiding it altogether.

Hunger is normal. A supposed benefit to living in the modern world is that few people go hungry anymore. Even if you’re poor, or heck, even homeless, you can usually fill your belly with adequate calories. But the flip-side of this is that no one’s ever hungry. Most people reside in a state of perpetual snacking. Instead of eating separate meals, they’re consuming a steady drip of food throughout the day. When you allow yourself to go hungry between meals, the food you do eat tastes better (hunger is the best spice). When you (gasp) skip a meal, you kickstart fat-burning and unlock a host of beneficial health effects.

Intensity of training rules. Make your short workouts shorter and more intense and your long workouts longer and easier. Go hard if you’re going to go hard. Go easy if you’re going to go easy. Don’t spend all your time in that middle area where you’re working hard for hours at a time, and you end up getting hurt or overeating or being unable to recover.

Just eat plants and animals. This is really what healthy eating comes down to: eating plants (nuts, berries, leafy greens, cruciferous vegetables, herbs and spices, sea vegetables, roots, and tubers) and animals (pasture-raised beef, lamb, pork, bison, ostrich, venison, chicken, and eggs; dairy, particularly grass-fed and fermented dairy; sea animals like wild fish, shellfish, and various other crustaceans). If you do that, and make sure you’re eating the whole animal—offal, skin, bones—and not just muscle meat, you’ll be hard pressed to find a nutritional deficiency.

Keep up with your social relationships. You don’t have to be a social gadfly. You don’t have to be the life of the party or have dozens upon dozens of friends and acquaintances. But it’s important to have people (however many) you can really count on.

Lift heavy things. Strength training isn’t just for gym bros. Gym bros need it, yes, but strength training is absolutely essential for everyone. The elderly and women in particular should lift heavy things because they’re the populations most at risk for osteoporosis and most likely to avoid strength training for fear of injury or “getting too bulky.” Lean muscle mass is the strongest correlate with mortality. As Mark Rippetoe says, stronger people are harder to kill.

Mind your carb intake. Eat the right number of carbs for you, your situation, you training level, your personal physiology, your carb tolerance. For many people, this means eating fewer carbs. For some, it warrants eating more of them.

Nature is your home. We all come from nature. For millions of years, humans and our ancestors lived in forests, prairies, open plains, deserts, along rivers, near beaches, on mountains, in valleys. If you’ve ever gone camping and just felt right at home, that’s because you were home. So go camping, go barefoot in the dirt, hike as often as you can, trail run, gaze at the stars, peer at far-off vistas (don’t just take a photo with your phone and forget about it), go to the beach/desert/snow.

Old age isn’t the end. To be Primal is to age gracefully. It may not make you live past (or even to) a hundred, but by lifting heavy things regularly you can build the lean mass that will keep you vibrant and the strength that will allow you to attack life until you drop. By staying active, you’ll never give your body a chance to settle into old age sedentism. By keeping your mind engaged, getting enough sleep, and eating colorful plants and nutrient-dense animals, you will very possibly stave off the cognitive degeneration we normally associate with old age. Being Primal promotes compression of morbidity. Even if your life isn’t any longer than your pill-popping, walker-using peers, it will almost assuredly be better.

Play more. Adult humans are funny creatures. We complain about the drudgery of our jobs, the lack of “fun” in our lives, that there’s “nothing to do” on the weekends, yet we squander a characteristic intrinsic to humans and fairly unique in the animal kingdom: our ability to play. Mammals play, but many of them stop once they reach adulthood. Human adults stop playing, too, but they don’t have to. Play (physical, mental, whatever’s enjoyable) keeps us young and makes life worth living. Plus, it’s just fun. And that’s everything.

Question everything. I created the Primal Blueprint only because I began questioning conventional wisdom. And I’ve never stopped questioning what I or others believe because I consider it essential to this kind of life. Examine your biases. Question your assumptions. Accept nothing less.

Run really fast sometimes. Folks often say that humans aren’t really great sprinters. We can’t outrun most wild animals in a flat-out foot race. But it’s undeniable that sprinting is, pound for pound, the best use of your training time if brevity is the concern. The science confirms this. It boosts fat burning, increases both short-distance and long-distance cardiovascular fitness, builds strength in a fraction of the time it’d take to achieve it through other means. If I can’t do anything else, if I can’t get to the gym or I only have a few minutes to spare, I sprint. Always. I find a steep hill and run up it as fast I can.

Sit less. It’s not enough to exercise 3-5 times a week, go on long hikes when you get the opportunity, and actively commute to work on a bike. Every hour you spend sitting has metabolic and longterm consequences. Study after study has found strong connections between time spent sitting and all-cause mortality—even controlling for exercise.

Take it easy. It’s a misconception that hunter-gatherers work harder than anyone else. Experts who have studied modern hunter-gatherer societies estimate that most members of these communities spend about 3-5 hours a day “working”. If you want to be like Grok, make sure you get plenty of leisure time.

Use your mind. The human brain has conquered the planet, pondered the great mysteries of our universe, and invented the iPhone. It’s a real shame to squander it. Read books. Write books. Engage in lively, stimulating conversations. Think deeply. Study philosophy, science, history. Learn another language. Create something. Play an instrument.

Visit the moment. The past is gone. The future isn’t here yet. But right now? Right here? The present moment is all we have. It’s all we’ll ever have, so we’d better pay attention to it or we’ll miss out on our entire lives.

Walk a lot. Humans are obligate walkers. It’s simply what we do best. And though the demands of modern life—jobs, commutes, and home lives we spend sitting for hours and hours—have turned us into elective sitters, the human body responds remarkably well to lots of slow movement throughout the day. I’m not saying you should quit your comfy job to became a wandering vagrant. Just find a balance between all that sitting and all that walking. Take hikes, park far away, walk to lunch, take five minute walking breaks every hour, go for an evening stroll after dinner—that kind of thing.

X-rays are Primal. Just because something wasn’t available to our paleolithic ancestors doesn’t mean it’s dangerous, or unhealthy, or undesirable. Humans are above all else tool users. Modern technology, whether smartphones, cars, computers, Twitter, or medical diagnostic imaging, can help us be healthier, happier, and arguably more Primal. We needn’t shun it. And modern science ultimately allows us to test our hypotheses regarding ancestral ways of living.

You’re the boss. You’re reading this blog and ostensibly paying attention to the words I write, but they’re just that: words for your consideration. They aren’t the law (even though I write about things called Primal Laws). They are suggestions. You decide what happens and, more importantly, how to respond to what happens. It’s your choice to make.

Zs are valuable quarry. That’s an awkward way of saying “prioritize sleep.” Without sleep, we can’t recover from our workouts. We can’t consolidate memories or integrate new skills we’ve just learned. Without sleep, our health suffers. Our resistance to stress decreases, our attraction to junk food increases, and our insulin sensitivity plummets. Poor sleep is associated with a host of health issues, like cancer, diabetes and obesity. Better catch your Zs (napping helps).

That about does it, folks. Have I missed any major topics? Let me know in the comment board! Thanks for reading.

Filed under: Fitness