Mark’s Daily Apple

Dear Mark: Go Primal in 2009

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Exit for Primal Pkwy

We’ve had a lot of fun the last week or so putting together 2008 “retrospects” and looking forward to MDA’s strides in the year ahead. In that spirit, I thought I’d start out this first (real) post-holiday week with something new, something different, something I hope will be a grand movement within the MDA collective and our mission. In lieu of a Dear Mark question for this week, I want to put forth a big, broad, bold, communal call for a 2009 “Primal Challenge.” Let’s unroll this puppy. The deal is this…. Whether you’re a veteran “apple” looking for creative ways to up your game this year or a MDA newbie intrigued but unsure of where to start, I want this challenge to be all about you. It’s a challenge to personally take on the Primal method - own it, mold it, and make it a meaningful structure for your lifestyle and individual health goals - whatever and wherever they are this year.

We hear it so often that it gets trite, but I still believe that the idea of a resolution, a full-out, take-it-on, I’m-all-in new year’s commitment can still mean something - and hopefully something big, something life-changing for your year. The difference is this: that the objective is a truly personal one and the means are truly effective. As for the means part, the Primal Blueprint, we’ve got your covered. The studies are there. The stories are posted. The workout ideas, the recipes, the pep talks, and community exchanges are all there. We’ll keep ‘em coming (and then some - videos, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc.) this year. But the resolution itself and the “personal” nature bit? Well, that’s your piece of course. Everybody’s in a different spot with different concerns.

My question to you is this: On the scale of true wellness (real vitality), where would you rate your life today? Mull it over some if you need to. Second question: What is the change that you’re ready and willing to bring to your life right now? The 2009 challenge can be bold, even ground-breaking in fact. It can open up a new dimension of vitality for the already healthy and fit. It can better merge wellness with your everyday life. It can reboot said life if you’ve been caught in an unhealthy streak. (No need to apologize. Just join us - no questions asked!) But let’s first make it real, rooted in where you find yourself now. How can your particular resolution, the challenge you choose to take on this year, feel like the next logical but momentous step in moving your life forward?

And this is the thing. Living “primally” isn’t all hard work. At its best, it cultivates the overall “self-care” concept from last week’s New Year’s Reflect, Regroup, Resolve post. How about putting some fun back in your workouts? How about making your workouts fit more with a happy and active social/family life than with a tired gym routine? What about sleeping better? How about some de-stress practices and truly self-indulgent routines? (We’ve got a “personal spa” post this week if that one grabs your attention….) Do I have you on board yet?

For the readers who have been with me for some time now, I want to say thanks. I hope you find all the upcoming changes this year useful, relevant, and enjoyable. Many of you have seen the blog truly grow from the ground up, and I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts on the evolution ahead. Your feedback and perspectives along the way have been absolutely instrumental! For the many of you who have joined us this last year, let me say welcome! Though you may still be in “exploratory” mode, filling in the blanks here and there (hopefully Saturday’s “Best of 2008” helped!) and finding a personal toehold in the Primal paradigm, I hope you’ll join us (and feel free to jump in with all the questions and insights that the experience offers)!

Again, best wishes to everyone out there. I think 2009 will shape up to be a momentous year for MDA and I hope for you, each of our readers, as well. Here’s to a powerful, Primal 2009: let the games begin!

Your turn now: What’s your self-designed Primal Plan for the year? Share your new year’s intentions and Primal priorities for the 2009 challenge!

What to expect here? Check-ins, updates, support, tips, motivation - along the entire way! More to come, we promise! (And for some refreshers, be sure to check out posts from the previous 30-day challenge, the Definitive Guide to the Primal Blueprint, and all of 2008’s best.)

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Mark Sisson Announcements, Dear Mark, Health, Personal Improvement, Primal Health 14 Comments »

Weekend Link Love

Here at the Daily Apple type 2 diabetes is a common topic, but type 1 is rarely mentioned. Six Until Me offers some great personal insight on living with type 1 diabetes.

Hungry? Why wait? Eat some dark chocolate. Dr. Briffa explains why dark chocolate may satisfy the appetite more than milk chocolate.

Can one be both vegetarian and Primal? Modern Forager does a good job of tackling this meaty subject. And also, check out these vegetarian protein possibilities.

Adding to the Apple’s long history of cheap Primal food options, read Wisebread’s tips for eating in restaurants and sticking to a budget.

Or forget eating out and cook it yourself. Check out Mary Dan Eades great list of cookbooks (There’s even one for the Primal vegetarian).

The New Year has come, but it’s not too late to send your friend a healthy holiday E-Card specially designed by the Center for Disease Control. Nothing warms the heart like a message from the CDC.

Last month it was upside down yoga and Kermit yoga. This month it’s partner yoga. Next month it will probably be yogahop. Or not.

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Worker Bee Health 3 Comments »

Rewind and Fast Forward

2008 was a fantastic year for Mark’s Daily Apple. I had the pleasure of connecting with so many wonderful people. The whole blogging experience - interacting with readers, covering fascinating new studies, the research that goes into a blog post, sharing a bit of my personal life - has been a truly inspiring and an edifying experience. I hope my readers can say the same about their time spent on MDA.

2009 is looking to be even better. Mark’s Daily Apple is getting a complete overhaul. Earlier this year I asked you what you wanted out of MDA. You responded and I’ve been working since then on providing it. In just a few months expect a whole new look and feel, and new features (free e-books, regular video posts, more “Definitive Guide” posts, a Primal Blueprint forum, a Primal Fitness column with specific workout suggestions and more) from MDA.

Also, as many of you probably know, my book, The Primal Blueprint, is being published early this next year. Again, the dialogue I’ve had with my readers over the last couple years has helped me refine the Primal Blueprint. And because of this I am now just months away from rolling out the book.

But before we get on with all the new and exciting developments I want to take a quick look back at some of the best posts of 2008. Below are some of my faves. It was incredibly difficult to boil down somewhere around 500 blog posts to a short list of the best. I meant to keep it to 10, but it got a little out of control. These are the posts that generated the most interest and that, if you haven’t already read them, you should give a gander. I’d love to hear which blog posts stuck out to you this year. Hit me up in the comment boards!

A Look Back at 2008

All “Definitive Guide” Posts: The Definitive Guide posts always got a great discussion started and I really enjoyed putting a little extra effort into each of them so that they could be a source of repeated reference on some hot topics relating to the Primal Blueprint. I’ve included them all here (including a couple - the bottom two - from 2007).

• The Definitive Guide to Primal Supplementation
• The Definitive Guide to the Primal Eating Plan
• The Definitive Guide to Grains
• The Definitive Guide to the Primal Blueprint
• The Definitive Guide to Fats
• The Definitive Guide to Cholesterol
• The Definitive Guide to Stress, Cortisol and the Adrenals
• The Definitive Guide to Insulin, Blood Sugar and Type II Diabetes

More Top Posts:

Orthorexia Nervosa and Dietary Obsession - Jan. 1

Flame Thrower: Top 10 Natural Ways to Reduce Inflammation - Jan. 15

Dear Mark: Chronic Cardio - Feb. 4

My Knee is Killing Me… No Really. - Mar. 3

The Art of Compromise - Apr. 23

10 Ways to “Get Primal� - Apr. 29

Washboard Abs on a High-Fat Diet, No Ab Workouts and No Cardio - May 7

Drink Less Water? - June 9

10 Ways to Forage in the Modern World - June 10

The Context of Calories - July 9

What Happens to Your Body When… You CARB BINGE? - June 11

The Prison Workout - July 23

Should We Allow Drugs in Sports? - July 29

Getting Back to Nature - August 28

Top 10 Ways to “Go Nuts� - Oct. 7

10 Steps to “Primalize� Your Pantry - Nov. 11

What’s the Difference Between Paleo and Primal? - Nov. 12

Cowpooling: Share a Side - Dec. 4

The Primal Blueprint Sneak Preview - Dec. 18

If you are looking for a more thorough “Best of 2008″ list click here.

Odds and Ends:

- A big part of MDA in 2008 was providing readers with Primal recipes, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t include at least a few recipe links:

The Entire Series of Eat This Today, Feel Better Tomorrow: 1, 2, 3, Intermittent Fasting, Special Occasions and Dessert Editions

- Talk about great feedback from readers. This year’s 30-Day Primal Health Challenge was a huge success. This series of posts may be of particular interest to anyone starting the New Year with some health resolutions.

The Primal Health Challenge: Posts 1 and 2 plus the Primal Health Challenge Week 1 Results, Week 2 Results, Week 3 Results, Final Results

- Last, but not least I was honored to have some fantastic guest posts this year from the top health and fitness bloggers on the net:

Free the Animal: My Self-Experimentation and Transformation

Go Healthy Go Fit: Staying Healthy and Fit in Different Lifestyles

Fitness Black Book: Shake Your Gym Addiction. The Outside World is Waiting For You

10 Questions with MizFit from MizFitOnline

Modern Forager: The Tropical Oils

The IF Life: Building Muscle 101

Thanks to the MDA community for making 2008 such a great year. Stay tuned for an even better year in 2009!

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Mark Sisson Best of 7 Comments »

Second Opinions

“Trust me. I’m a professional.”

Sometimes I just think the world is collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. My water bill last month was twice its usual already-outrageous amount. Since we hadn’t (to my knowledge) taken any more showers than normal, I figured there had to be a leak somewhere. Duh, right? I did a cursory review of all toilets and faucets in the house. Nothing. I had my gardeners check out the landscape irrigation system. Nothing. So I called my plumber/golf buddy Ted who said he had a guy who did leak detection and this guy was the best there is. Twenty years in the business and that’s all he does. Leaks. So I told Ted to send him on over, because this hydro-hemorhhage was mounting up fast.

Twenty minutes later the guy shows up and immediately starts diagnosing. He turns off the main valve at the house and sees that the meter wheel stops spinning, so he figures since it’s not between the meter and the house, it has to be inside the house. That’s bad.

He goes to his truck and gets a bunch of fancy detection devices all neatly stored in separate anvil cases. One looks like a stethoscope; another like a fancier version of those metal detectors they use down at the beach to find spare change. He tells me, “Don’t worry, I’ll find that sucker. I do this all the time.” Loved his bedside manner. Miraculously, after listening to all the sink pipes on the ground floor, he determines that the leak is in the hot water system - definitely not the cold - and that it’s somewhere in the slab under the house. That’s bad.

After twenty minutes of further dousing for pipes under the slab and listening through his high-tech stethoscope, he assures me he has found the leak. It’s definitely “right here in the slab under the dryer but just beneath this bearing wall. We’ll have to jack-hammer up all your matching [expensive] travertine tile, remove the wall, reinforce it and replumb all the way to the water heater to be sure.” That’s REALLY bad. I ask, “you sure about this?” He looks at me like I’m an idiot and says, “Absolutely. This is all I do all day long. It’s right under here.” OK.

He leaves me with a bill for $300 and drives off. Nice work for 45 minutes. I didn’t make that even when I was a “trainer to the stars.”

I’m about to call plumber/golf buddy Ted and tell him to bring the crew and the jack-hammers over on Monday when I get a wild one and decide maybe I’ll get a second opinion first. I call another leak detecting service from the Yellow Pages who sends a guy right over. He gets out a similar assortment of detection equipment and spends 25 minutes putting blue tape all over the floor to mark where the pipes are before I suggest (wink, wink) that maybe it’s in the hot water system. Another 25 minutes passes and he says, “there’s no freakin’ way there’s a leak in your hot water system or inside your house. Have you checked your pool auto-fill valve?” “uh, no.” “Let’s look.” Sure enough, the autofill valve (it’s like the one in your toilet) was stuck, causing water to flow into our infinity pool which was, in turn, leaking water infinitely through an obscured underground drainpipe. Case closed. Since this guy wasn’t “the best in the business,” he only charged $250.

I tell you all this as an illustration of how easy it is to become enamored of “specialists” and “professionals” in a world that has grown increasingly complex. I could easily have gone and had my entire kitchen floor jack-hammered at great expense and disruption only to have the initial problem continue to drive me crazy for months. I find that this happens all too often in many other areas (tech support from Mumbai that has you defragging your disc or reinstalling your operating system when a patch or reboot would have done), but most notably in medicine. How often do we all hear stories of expensive surgeries undertaken because a battery of tests (that weren’t that solid to begin with) “indicated” that there was a problem that needed fixing? Many prophylactic mastectomies or prostate biopsies or quadruple bypasses are probably not necessary (in my humble opinion). Yet they can severely compromise lives forever if they really weren’t necessary or if a few lifestyle interventions might have done a much better trick. How about the prescribing of multiple drugs to address symptoms or bring a few “out-of-norm” numbers back into the proper range? And then prescribing additional drugs to offset the side-effects of the first drugs - all based on sketchy diagnoses. My knee surgery last year would not have been necessary had my doctor not hastily shot cortisone under my kneecap. Long story. But, hey, he only had seven minutes of office visit time to make the (wrong) diagnosis and, hey, he was my friend. Oh well, my bad. If anyone should have seen that coming it was me.

I tell anyone who will listen that lawyers, doctors and CPAs don’t have answers. They only have opinions and sometimes those opinions are no better (and often worse) than your own instincts. This is why we at MDA are on a mission to try to help you better understand how your body works, so you can make educated, informed decisions when it comes to matters of health. Armed with an understanding of what might truly be behind your problem, that little extra you pay for a second or even third opinion might just make the difference.

Further Reading:

My Knee is Killing Me… No Really.

Washboard Abs on a High Fat Diet, No Ab Workouts and No Cardio?

Health Engagment: Where Do You Find that Personal Touch?

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The Best of December 2008

Richard Nikoley’s Self-Experimentation and Transformation - Dec. 2

Become a Clubbell Master - Dec. 3

Cowpooling: Share a Side - Dec. 4

Dear Mark: Should I Get a Flu Shot? - Dec. 8

Oprah Hits 200 Pounds. Again. - Dec. 10

Eat With Your Hands - Dec. 11

My Top 10 Favorite Books - Dec. 16

The Primal Blueprint Sneak Preview - Dec. 18

The Many Uses of Almond Meal - Dec. 22

The Power of Holiday Tradition - Dec. 24

Shouting Groceries: When 110% Isn’t Such a Good Idea - Dec. 26

Top 5 Referrers of December 2008

1. CrossFit Endurance
2. Modern Forager
3. Conditioning Research
4. The IF Life
5. Whole Health Source

What you would like me to write about? Drop me a line in the comment boards with your questions and suggestions. As per my “Dear Mark� series of posts I began this year, the topic can be personal. So what are you waiting for? You’ve just been offered free personalized health advice. Hit me up with a comment!

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Mark Sisson Best of 18 Comments »