Mark's Daily Apple

What a Difference a Few Months Can Make

Dear Mark,

I have had fast, great success with the Primal lifestyle and I would like to add my story to your growing library in order to encourage others who have lost hope of ever getting that middle-age weight back off.

For most of my life, I kept myself in fairly good condition. I was a 1979 graduate of The Citadel, with military experience at Fort Bragg, so staying fit enough to achieve a top score of 300 on physical readiness evaluations came easily and naturally. I kept to the correct weight of 158 to 160 for a long time. But as the decades wore on, I lost sight of the importance of staying fit and it showed. As a writer, I had spent a lot of time in front of the computer, and it was getting difficult to sit down without unfastening the 38-inch belt on my jeans. On September 23, 2011, my family visited out-of-town relatives while I stayed home to work. At one point I got up to stretch and I saw my reflection in a mirror: fat, pear-shaped, and pasty-faced. I had known that my five-foot, nine-inch frame was getting too heavy, but I had no idea until I saw it that day. I weighed 207 pounds.

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Posted By: Mark Sisson

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What is Inflammation?

Inflammation is one of those words that people use without really thinking about its actual meaning. So today we’re going to take a bit of a break from the blood lipid series to cover inflammation. In later posts, I’ll dig deeper into how the inflammatory response works with stuff like exercise and heart disease, but for now, I’ll just get the basics out there.

Existence is suffering, according to certain schools of thought. I don’t know that I’d go quite that far, but I would emphatically state that anyone who spends a modicum of sentient time in the space time continuum we call existence is gonna experience some unpleasantness. A bump on the knee, a bacterial infection, an acute injury, a persistent illness, a death of a loved one, a broken heart. It’s a big and often angry world that doesn’t necessarily care about you, and something’s gotta give. When that happens and the sanctity of our bodies is interrupted by pain, injury, or illness, our bodies respond with inflammation.

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Posted By: Mark Sisson

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How Much Have Human Dietary Requirements Evolved in the Last 10,000 Years?

A hallmark of the Primal Blueprint is that our genetics were shaped by our ancestral environment. That the foods to which we had access, the amount of sun and stress and sleep to which our bodies became accustomed, the movement patterns in which we engaged represented environmental factors that exerted selective pressure on our genetic makeup and phenotypic expression to make us who we are today. As a result, heeding those environmental factors generally results in excellent health. And, even more importantly, many evolutionarily novel environmental factors – like grains, refined sugar, and high omega-6 vegetable oils (plus chronic stress, poor sleep, and all that other good stuff ) – are things to which we’ve only recently been exposed. When we are exposed to them in excess, like in say 21st century America, it generally results in poor health. Hence our current predicament.

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Posted By: Mark Sisson

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Introducing The Primal Blueprint: Updated and Expanded Paperback Edition

With strong sales of the original hardcover Primal Blueprint book over the past three years, I was honored by a request from mainstream retailers (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.) to produce the Primal Blueprint in paperback. Piece of cake, right? Get rid of those couple annoying typos, edit a bit here and there, then fire up the presses, right? Not quite. In the past few years, plenty has happened to further shape and refine the Primal philosophy. Much of this progress has come from the amazing contribution of the Primal/paleo/evolutionary health community: lively commenting and blogging on the Internet, and the magic of live connections at presentations and conventions. The movement has exploded beyond my wildest dreams and continues to pick up momentum daily.

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Posted By: Mark Sisson

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Community, Accountability, and a New Year Challenge

Happy New Year, everyone! Is everyone pumped for 2012? Resolutions made and in action yet?

I’m coming at the new year with big plans, the first of which is a brand spankin’ new Challenge. I’ll get to that in a minute, but let me first say a few words about the power of resolutions.

Experts tell us that those who make resolutions are literally ten times more likely to achieve their goals than those who are interested in change but don’t make a specific, concrete commitment. Now that’s reason to resolve. Sure, motivation can and does wane. A little less than half of those who make resolutions are still committed to the journey six months down the road, but there’s plenty we can do to make sure we’re not among those who detour themselves. Among the most effective strategies: making your resolution public (PDF). Announce it to the world. Shout it from the rooftops. Own it. Flaunt it. Do a dance around it on YouTube. Tell the world you’re going to make this happen. Chances are then, you will. And you’ll have a great time doing it.

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Posted By: Mark Sisson

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