When an author shares your book review...
In case you missed it, author Richard Nikoley was kind enough to acknowledge my review of his book Free the Animal: How to Lose Weight and Fat on the Paleo Diet on his own blog. He also shared the review on his Facebook page. I knew there was a possibility that Nikoley might share my review (I went out of my way to make him aware of it, tagging him on Twitter so he would at least see it), so I made sure to proofread and ensure my review was polished before posting; just as I always do. However, when Nikoley shared the review on Facebook, it hit home that my lowly blog had been shared on a site with a huge regular readership and over 3,000 likes on Facebook.
Cue mental crisis!
I immediately scanned back over my post and made a couple of minor wording and punctation adjustments. There were no glaring errors or major misprints, but the idea of easy readability takes on new significance when the audience of a blog and the writer's reputation is suddenly put before a much larger group of people for a short time.
An identical crisis of confidence occurred last year when I reviewed J. Stanton's The Gnoll Credo on HubPages. Eventually, I will learn to let my copy rest for a day or two before proofreading and finally publishing it to the web. It would help me to avoid this crippling state of mind.
Crippling? Yes. The following visual aid should communicate it fairly succinctly.
The M&M's website is not safe for kids!
I told them I was eleven.
While researching material for the fitness ebook I am currently writing for Kindle, I pulled up the M&M's company website a minute ago to check some nutrition information. To my surprise, it has an age lock!
On a hunch, I screencapped the page. Then I put in my date of birth, but changed the year. According to the Mars Corporation, I was an eleven year-old boy. As such, I was too young to be a participant in their "responsible marketing" of sugar-coated sugar to American youth via "toys and games."
Between HBO's Weight of the Nation ringing its bell and Mayor Bloomberg capitalizing on the publicity with the NYC ban on large sodas, the entire snack food industry is on edge right now.
Heck, even Alec Baldwin is weighing in on the fun,
I didn't intend to post a second entry today, but I just found this little tidbit way too entertaining not to share. I don't generally follow the news, but I am writing about health and fitness a lot these days and the fact that it took a well-publicized documentary to kickstart this sudden hysteria interests me greatly.
I had a film teacher in college who talked about working for the California Department of Transportation in the 1960s (yeah, he was old). His job was to assist in filming informational shorts about automobile safety.
Every film included elaborately staged crash tests in which dummies were mercilessly hurled through windshields and slammed into steering wheels. The air was thick with statistics and numbers, chosen specifically for their capacity to frighten viewers into wearing seat belts and stopping completely at every intersection.
"But," Dr. Karimi said, with an air of disbelief which had not waned in fifty years, "no matter how much damn information we threw at them, the statistics never changed! People still got into accidents and acted stupid all over the highway." He took a deep breath and looked up at the class again. "I learned...one thing...from that experience. You can't sell safety. You can tell people how bad something is and show them exactly what will happen, but people will still do whatever they want to do."
You can't sell safety. And you can't sell health. Government initiatives can throw as much money as they want at the issues of obesity and public health consciousness, but people will continue to eat whatever makes them feel good. And, to stir the pot even more, America is built on the ideals of free enterprise. What happens to other laws when a mayor can ban something as insignificant as a soda cup? I don't want to veer into a slippery slope fallacy, but laws do set legal precedents...
If people want it, companies will make it. If companies make it before the people think of it, people want it all the more. It's an interesting cycle that is very telling about our culture.
On that note, there are some excellent blog entries which I would like to recommend. I don't know if the moon is full or not, but today was a great day for paleo bloggers.
I wrote a few lines ago that people will eat what they want to eat. J. Stanton's latest post on Gnolls.org, beautifully titled Why Are We Here, And What Are We Looking For? Food Associations And The Pitfalls Of The Search For Novelty helps illuminate exactly why we become so attached to certain foods, good for us or not.
Concluding our contemplation of the government's attempting a nationwide stomach-stapling through "reform," Richard NIkoley (whose book I recently reviewed) just blogged about how the government is not great hope for our nation's health--healthy people are. He also included a superb video. Check it out at Free the Animal: Paleos & Primals: YOU are the Key, not Disney or Michelle Obama
Be healthy. Be blessed.
Eating paleo and shopping in my sleep: "Free the Animal" reviewed.
Writer, blogger and entrepreneur Richard Nikoley is one of the more colorful and unique characters in the paleo blogosphere. He and I are very different people and I don't agree with him on everything by a long shot. The posts on his blog, Free the Animal, are blunt, confrontational, often delivered with unabashed profanity...but they are also downright entertaining. His take-no-prisoners attitude, especially pronounced when met with stupidity or bad reasoning, often provides much-needed doses of reality for the paleo community, whose information-cycling bloggers often seem to exist in a grass-fed and organically-pastured netherworld of online pontification.
The past year saw my own transition into a paleo-style diet and lifestyle. What began as a gradual series of minor lifestyle changes in an effort to lose weight, (portion control, cutting out soda, etcetera), led to deeper study that went beyond weight loss and into the ideas surrounding “ancestral” health. By the time Nikoley released the printed version of his take on paleo living, Free the Animal: How to Lose Weight and Fat on the Paleo Diet, I was already a grain-free, fifty pounds lighter, Vibram-wearing stereotype and I doubted the book would contain information that I hadn’t heard before from one source or another. However, I enjoy the blog and respect the man enough that a purchase of the print edition of Free the Animal was justified.
At least, I think I purchased it.
The exact event of my ordering the book remains a little hazy in my mind. I remember adding it to my Amazon.com wish list, then waking up one morning to an email confirming an order for it. There were extenuating circumstances--it was late in the semester and school was keeping me up at odd hours; I’ve come to expect occasional blackouts during such periods. However, in this case I suspect that a larger game might have been afoot, for upon my telling the 140-character version of this story on Twitter, I received a response from the man himself:
Hmm...well played, sir.
The apparent dubiousness of the purchase aside, I would like to share my opinion on Richard’s book, and how it measured up to my expectations.
The book is quite literally a printed compilation of Nikoley’s blog entries about the paleo lifestyle; compiled and printed by the ebook publishing company, HyperInk. In the interest of reaching a broader audience, Nikoley’s trademark colorful vocabulary has been toned down considerably, but his personality remains strong, as does the communication of his ideas without the extra saltiness.
The book has fourteen major sections, each of them easy to read and digest:
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: The Paleo, Primal, Ancestral Lifestyle
- Chapter 2: Your Inner Animal
- Chapter 3: The Standard American Diet And Other Diet Health Disasters
- Chapter 4: Fat Is King
- Chapter 5: The Cholesterol Con
- Chapter 6: Natural Disease Prevention
- Chapter 7: Eat Like A Caveman
- Chapter 8: The Power of Fasting
- Chapter 9: Evolutionary Exercise And Fitness
- Chapter 10: A Primal Weight Loss Plan
- Chapter 11: Recipes And Supplements
- Chapter 12: Success Stories
- About The Blog
The information in the book is solid and presented cohesively, as can be expected. But instead of giving away all of the information it contains, I would like to hone in what I felt set it apart from most literature about ancestral living. Unlike the path taken by most paleo nutritionists, Free the Animal does more than provide yet another treatise on insulin spikes, omega-3s and fat-protein-carbohydrate ratios; Free the Animal presents the paleo lifestyle as common sense.
Yes, Nikoley discusses nutrition and biology; yes, he discusses the psychology of food and intermittent fasting. But unlike the professional gurus who go to great pains to overawe readers with a doctoral dissertation’s worth of facts, statistics and observational studies, Nikoley’s book lays out the paleo lifestyle and its guiding philosophies in a refreshingly relatable way.
For paleo newcomers, I would honestly recommend Free the Animal as the starting point before moving on to the lengthier works of gurus like Robb Wolf or Mark Sisson. It isn’t that Richard Nikoley or Free the Animal are a “better” choice; to the contrary, most other paleo nutritionists provide much more detailed information, and longer and more colorful books to boot. But the main reason I loved Free the Animal was its no-frills, straightforward presentation. Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint changed my life last year, but I have to admit that its sheer amount of information scared me to death when I first picked it up.
By comparison, Free the Animal is both more and less of an assault to those readers who are just beginning to be interested in paleo nutrition. It is more of an assault because Nikoley does not suffer fools lightly and pulls few punches as a communicator. But Free the Animal nevertheless remains extremely relatable. Ever chapter presents its subject(s) through more than just the interpretation of impersonal data; Nikoley relates the impact of ancestral health, nutrition and fitness to everyday life. By attaching it to concrete ideas like personal appearance, productivity and a healthy sex life, the impact of the paleo diet takes on a significance beyond buzzwords like “burning fat” or “building muscle.”
So, is Free the Animal worth purchasing?
If you are already eating like a caveman, chances are you won’t learn anything new. However, if you want good introductory material in your lending library, this is a great book to keep around. And if you need a gift for “one of those friends” who complain ceaselessly about their weight while stubbornly continuing to fill up on empty and processed food products, Richard Nikoley’s Free the Animal might provide the necessary shot in the arm.
Free the Animal (Blog)
Purchase “Free the Animal: Lose Weight and Fat on the Paleo Dietl” on Amazon
Favorite Blogs: Fitness and Nutrition
If it's true that what goes around comes around, I'd like to start throwing a little love toward some of my favorite blogs.
This week, I want to focus on blogs about healthy nutrition and fitness.
Almost a year ago, I decided to make some fairly drastic changes in my life. I was very overweight and eating a steady diet of processed, unhealthy food. Starting last June, I made incremental lifestyle changes to the point where I am right now; fifty pounds lighter and enjoying a grain-free, primal/paleo diet of whole foods.
To stay current on information and stay inspired in my new lifestyle, I read a lot of blogs about paleo nutrition and natural exercise. I am also building a home library of books which I steadily lend out to friends and family seeking a new lease on life. In that spirit of sharing knowledge, these are a few of my favorite blogs, with my reasons for liking them:
- Diabetes-Warrior.Net - Steve Cooksey has not cured his diabetes, but he no longer takes medication for it. He manages his health entirely through a low-carb paleo diet and keeps up a lifestyle which is far more active and healthy than most diabetics can even dream of without insulin. His blog is rife with data gathered through research and self-experimentation. I am not diabetic and never have been, but Steve is an inspiration, and his straightforward approach to health and longterm wellness is just a reminder that Hippocrates was right when he said "let thy food be thy medicine."
- Fed Up With Lunch - Sarah Wu, known for a long time under the pseudonym "Mrs. Q," is an amazing human being. She is committed to improving the quality of American school lunches. Sarah ate these lunches for a year before writing a book about her experiences. Her blog has a global perspective, examining the content, quality and cost of school lunches around the world, and her friendly, conversational writing style helps expose ways in which American school systems can help their kids through serving them better food.
- Free the Animal - The online paleo community is made up of many diverse personalities. Richard Nikoley is one of the more colorful figures in the blogosphere. Styling himself as the "Angry Dick" of paleo bloggers, Richard has a no-nonsense delivery which appeals to me. He is also a titan in the field of self-experimentation. If there is a sacred cow, he will chase it down and convert it to burger, just to see what happens. Free the Animal has great value as a source of researched data and experiments on a variety of topics, but it is also worth reading for its sheer entertainment value. I recently picked up Richard's book, also entitled Free the Animal, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a starting point for anyone interested in a paleo meal plan.
- Gnolls.org - J. Stanton authored one of the most life-changing novels I ever read in the form of his book The Gnoll Credo. It is a story which made me clean out my closet and reevaluate my life. I wrote a review of it on Hubpages, which actually led to my corresponding with Stanton via email. Stanton is a proponent of ancestral health, and his articles on nutrition and biology are both interesting and exhaustively researched. Readers beware; reading anything written by J. Stanton is liable to cause unscheduled life change, increase in focus and sudden and vocal expressions of primal energies. You have been warned.
- LivingSuperhuman - Brothers Andrew and Anthony Frezza don't settle for anything less than life lived to the fullest. They are committed to encouraging other people to break plateaus and raise the bar for themselves as both physical and emotional beings, hence the presence of "superhuman" in the blog's title. It is less a stated "paleo blog" than it is about eating foods that yield optimum results. It just so happens that the best foods to eat fall in line with a paleo meal plan. Together, the Frezzas provide excellent workout advice, nutrition information and recipes for delicious and nutrient-dense meals designed for athletes' needs. LivingSuperhuman also recognizes something that many other paleo-minded writers minimize: that "cheat" meals are inevitable. Instead of criticizing or reminded people to mind their creeping carb counts, the voices of LS are encouraging, going so far as to freely share their own (infrequent) indulgences. In my opinion, such departure from the rigidity of dogma elevates Frezzas; both as a fitness writers and as all-around decent human beings. I'm currently involved in their Superhuman50 Challenge.
- Mark's Daily Apple - When someone first begins to research paleo nutrition, their first encounter is usually through the work of either Mark Sisson or Robb Wolfe. Mark Sisson's web site is updated steadily with articles, recipes and advice for living a healthy lifestyle according to Mark's easy to follow template, The Primal Blueprint. Mark writes excellent books and sells powerhouse nutritional supplements, but 99% of his work is available for free on his web site, indexed according to topic in an excellent search engine. Mark is a rare breed of health guru. He has an educational background in nutrition, a professional background as an world-class marathoner, and a compelling story of his own personal journey from a conventional athletic diet to a primal lifestyle which he makes extremely accessible to his readers. Mark's work is important to me, because it was his book and blog which were most instrumental in helping me to take control of my own life and reclaim my health. I always read his blog first.
- Physical Living - John Sifferman is a more recent discovery, but his blog is excellent. He talks about nutrition from time to time, but his blog is all about fitness. His workouts range from new strategies for old favorites (his posts about pull-ups are fantastic), to compound workout drills for more unique training tools and methods, such as clubbells.
- Zen to Fitness - Sometimes, information becomes so familiar that we stop hearing it. Zen to Fitness is a great blog because it takes the concept of fitness, which should be simple but is usually overcomplicated in the way it's presented, and reduces it back to its simplest terms. Needing to think less about something isn't always a bad thing; over-thinking fitness is usually what makes it drudgery, and Chris, the editor of Zen to Fitness, keeps the site stocked with articles espousing a healthy, fit lifestyle that is achieved and maintained through very simple methods.
Maybe it's not just the carbs...
Last year, I went Primal. No regrets. Mark Sisson's book got me going and his blog remains inspirational.
However, Mark isn't the only person who writes on primal living and ancestral health. Through expanding my knowledge of health and fitness, I have been exposed to the the ideas of other writers and bloggers who talk about the paleo and primal schools of thought.
The Primal Blueprint is a title. It is a structured "blueprint," written by Mark Sisson, for getting into good health and losing weight.
Bear in mind the meaning of the word "blueprint"--A plan, a map, a diagram. I most readily associate the word "blueprint" with house-building. But as we all know, there is more than just one way to build a house.
The Primal Blueprint is Mark Sisson's blueprint. It is based on sound research. It is effective for weight loss and body maintenance. It is, above all, a healthy way to live.
However, promoting this style of living is how Mark Sisson makes a living. His books are written by and large for people with bad habits and addictions to break. His meal plan is strictly regimented to bring the greatest results out of the greatest number of people. He tends to use a lot of general guidelines in his blog. That keeps his material well-reviewed and ensures that people like myself continue to refer other newcomers to his body of work.
I have followed the Primal Blueprint quite faithfully for the past six months. But as I wrote before, Mark's books and web essays are not my only source of information. If you read enough material, it becomes apparent that, although Mark is a larger-than-life figure in the primal/paleo movement, he represents only one school of thought. I do not say this to denigrate Mark or his work. Quite to the contrary, I believe that Mark has done more good than possibly any other individual in the paleo community. But I want to explore some thoughts of my own.
If one explores the "paleo diet," The Primal Blueprint is a fairly standard first encounter. But beyond the body-repairing information it offers for someone who is insulin-resistant and overweight, questions are rising that the paleo movement has not yet done research to answer fully. I have a few of my own which I would like to pose at this time.
Once the body has had time to repair itself, that is, for insulin sensitivity to be restored and for the body to adapt to the ideal fat-burning state for its energy needs, are natural carbohydrates still a problem?
I ask this because Richard Nikoley has done some extremely interesting self-experimentation lately, purposefully including extra starch in his diet in the form of potatoes. However, he has not increased his caloric intake, he has simply changed the fat : protein : carbohydrate ratios of his daily meals. And he has had good results, actually seeing beneficial changes in body composition.
This is one factor which increased my curiosity on the subject. Another was a point raised by Angelo Coppola in the last episode of his podcast, Latest in Paleo. He has also been eating more starch each week in the form of sweet potatoes and rice, and has reported results similar to the "leaning out" described by Richard Nikoley: looser pants, increased muscle definition.
This comes after the mainstream paleo community's applying a long-standing mantra of "lower = better" in reference to carb intake. But the movement is still relatively new. Its influence is creeping into everything from 60 Minutes to celebrity fitness, but there have yet to be many serious studies done to provide new baselines with which to measure more specific effects. More on that in a minute.
Is it carbs on their own, or the kind of carbs that are the problem?
The paleo diet, in its broadest definition, is simply eating the foods which our spear-weilding ancestors would have access to. Meat, fish, fowl, vegetables, fruit, nuts. Basically, this is a "whole foods" diet. Foods which can be consumed in their natural state without the need for processing. Grains are excluded from this list (yes, even whole grains) because not only do they require husking, grinding and the addition of extra ingredients to be eaten at all, the grains of today are not the same as what existed a hundred years ago, much less thousands of years ago. And it goes without saying that the recent phenomenon of mass gluten intolerance is yet another reason to avoid grain. I have personally found going grain-free to be the cure for my seasonal allergies.
With the exception of fruit, the paleo diet is grain-free and fairly low carb by its very nature. But when following a regimented eating plan like The Primal Blueprint, it has been my experience that it becomes easy to demonize many natural and pleasant foods like fruit and potatoes; relegating them to "once in a while" treats. But these foods occur naturally. Yes, they contain sugar, and, yes, that sugar is fructose. But, as even Dr. Lustig will readily state, fruit delivers its fructose load amidst naturally-occuring vitamins, minerals and fiber. They contain enough caloric weight that it is simply unpleasant to gorge oneself on fruit to the point of the sugar's affects on the liver, blood sugar and deposition of fat being worse than concurrent nutrients of the fruit delivering it.
If someone is breaking long-standing food addictions, that is where The Primal Blueprint is instrumental.
Speaking from experience, when an individual changes their entire lifestyle to eat natural foods instead of processed foods, it is hard not to constantly seek out "cheats" while there is a lingering addiction to processed sugars. Until the individual's palate returns to its "natural" state and can appreciate the full taste of natural foods, as well as the unbelievable sweetness of natural sugars in fruit, a structured meal plan, with "approved" foods and a carb count is not only helpful, one might say it is catalytic to long-term success.
The physical results of an individual's eating habits show themselves fairly readily and obviously. But what is too often overlooked, or under-discussed, is the unhealthy mental relationship that overweight individuals maintain with food. A popular Lao Tzu quote states that "mastering yourself is true power," and one could easily extrapolate that into an argument that if you can't master your own food consumption against the influence of a very flawed and unhealthy food culture, that is weakness. People declare this weakness every day; telling someone about your own grain-free or paleo diet is usually met with the knee-jerk response of "I could never do that."
It takes guidance and encouragement to help people overcome the onslaught of it, and sometimes a well-written book or a blog are all the only good influence an individual has in their life. For beginners, a blueprint is necessary.
After the initial stages, there comes a certain point in the primal/paleo journey in which it becomes obvious to you and everyone who knows you that you have made a decision to change your life permanently toward a whole-foods approach. This point is usually apparent when you realize that you no longer crave dark chocolate to "complete" a meal, and dairy products are seen less and less on your plate. It is something which I would describe as a mature relationship with food. It is a state of no longer being attached to or craving foods which are culturally mandated as "fun" or "special." Heck, you might be so in tune with your daily needs that you ignore the old standard of "three squares a day" and only eat when you're hungry, regardless if it's a regularly-timed for breakfast lunch or dinner. That is taking the idea of ancestral health beyond ingredients into the re-creation of habits and conditions--worthy experiments, but I digress.
Back to my point. If one has a established a healthy relationship with food, then the allure of sugar should not spark a binge if one chooses to eat some fruit or cut into a sweet potato. The whole idea of "ancestral living" is based on eating healthy food, and eating it according to need. This isn't your mom's low-fat crash diet; it is not about eating healthy food "most of the time" so as to feel better about a weekly nosedive into pizza, nachos and cheap beer.
Claiming a mature relationship with what and how you eat also implies that you are not going to habitually overeat. If natural sugar or starch is part of the meal, it should be factored in as part of the meal, not a superfluous addition that puts one "over the edge" of being full. Remove the desire to binge by including rewarding foods in daily meals.
Finally, if grain-free, whole foods are your first choice, regardless of carbohydrate content, this means that many of the studies which have been conducted about carbohydrates and weight gain no longer apply to you. To my knowledge, the accepted baseline studies have never been conducted from subjects who have lived any significant part of their lives on a whole foods diet. Therefore, their carbohydrate intake was largely from grains and sugars. The kinds of carbohydrates offered to the body by a sandwich bun or a sack of Fritos are much different than those offered from a berries, bananas or yams. The last three all have benefits to the human body that extend far beyond quick energy or post-workout glycogen replenishment. Furthermore, they are not full of synthetic, compound ingredients. The only ingredient in the last three foods are the foods themselves.
Like politics, religion and virtually everything else in any human culture that exists simultaneously in the areas of philosophy and process, the paleo movement has become fragmented into contrasting ideas.
"Paleo" does not strictly mean "low-carb, ketogenic diet."
The definition of the word "paleo" literally means "old," and is most often combined with geologic or biological terms. Hence the "Paleolithic Diet," referring to the eating habits of early humans.
This simple definition (and it truly is appallingly simple compared to many of the other ludicrous options offered to the weight and health conscious) only became fractured into its present, multi-faceted form as various new-school health and nutrition professionals have written and spoken to educate the masses on the subject.
Most books are written with weight loss in mind. Weight loss requires insulin sensitivity. To ensure insulin sensitivity, low-carb is ubiquitously recommended among paleo writers as the surefire way to go.
But once sensitivity is restored, and the decision has been made to eschew grains and processed non-foods, the old damage will not return. There is also the assumption that moderation is a way of life and that food will be eaten when hungry until the individual is not hungry any more.
So are natural carbs a problem?
I've been eating right for a long time now. At this point, it seems much more natural to eat right than it does to eat poorly. I was at a business meeting the other night where the dinner provided for attendees was a stack of delivered pizzas. I won't name the franchise, but I will say that I have never seen anything quite so repugnant as the overcooked slabs of dough with their scant population of cheese, sauce and toppings. And there was a time in my life when I would have eaten an entire pizza by myself in one sitting, washed down with a sugary beverage. Never mind the relative quality of ingredients or preparation...it's pizza, and pizza means good things are happening, right?
That was a long time ago. My entire life is different now. Now that the psychological chains are broken, even milder attractions don't appeal to me any more. I readily admit to indulging occasionally, but I reserve those times for foods that are truly unique and well-made, like when a friend brought home-dipped, chocolate-covered bacon to a movie party. With such exceptions accounted for, the other 99% of my diet is made up of naturally-occuring fats, proteins, starches and sugars.
So, last paragraph. let's see if I can make it good for a change...
Should we give some respect to our day-to-day preferences, eating a little more starch or fruit on some days and little-to-none on others? If one is not simply stacking extra calories on top of regular intake in their starchier meals, it does not seem like an unbalanced way to live. This is especially true when intermittent fasting is involved and leptin and insulin sensitivity is optimal. A mature relationship with food and not fretting over natural carbohydrate consumption seems a lot more fulfilling than avoiding something as tasty and refreshing as a piece of mango because of its sugar content.
Thoughts?
External Links:
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/the-book/the-primal-blueprint/
http://freetheanimal.com/2012/03/the-moderate-carbohydrate-flu.html
http://www.latestinpaleo.com/blog/2012/4/27/latest-in-paleo-56-who-you-gonna-trust.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57407294/is-sugar-toxic/
http://hwbfitness.hubpages.com/hub/matthew-mcconaughey-workout
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-to-intermittent-fasting/
Internal Links: