Mark’s Daily Apple

Scale Obsession

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Ah, the bathroom scale. Nearly every household has one, but the ways we treat them vary wildly. Some people fear the scale, and keep it tucked away behind the toilet. They might bring it out occasionally to settle a bet or to replenish their food guilt stores, but their relationship with the scale is mainly one of fear-driven avoidance – though you can be sure they never fail to sneak a guilty glance or two when brushing their teeth. Still others have a totally different relationship with the bathroom scale, treating it more like an addictive substance. They might weigh themselves daily, or even after every meal or workout, each tick downward giving them hope and each tick upward bringing despair – or it could be the complete opposite, depending on the person’s goals. Now, I don’t mean to disparage the scale itself. It’s a useful tool that gives us an accurate, objective measurement of what is for all intents and purposes an abstraction (without scales giving us actual numbers, most people would have trouble understanding weight as tangible), but we can obsess and overdo it. And when we do that, we lose sight of what eating right and living well is all about.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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The Primal Blueprint Guide to Dining Out

Primal living in a decidedly modern world is mostly awesome, but there are difficult moments we’ve all faced. Things like having to explain the jar of coconut oil and greasy spoon we keep at our office desks, or facing the strange looks we get when doing lunges down the street, pull-ups on tree branches, box jumps on park benches, and overhead presses with our pre-adolescent children – those little moments where you and everyone around you suddenly realize that maybe you’re just slightly different from the “norm.” A bit off, as it were. Of course, we often pride ourselves on our individualism, on our constant skepticism of Conventional Wisdom (especially diet- and fitness-related). If I wasn’t different (or at least willing to consider alternative viewpoints), I might never have questioned the bread-and-ice-cream-fueled chronic cardio way of life that was killing me. If you guys weren’t inherent skeptics, you probably never would have found your way to my blog. If a guy like Sterling scoffed at the supposed preposterousness of eating fat to lose fat, he’d probably still be unhealthy.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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How to Render Beef Tallow

As I wrote yesterday’s post, I realized that I’d never actually made my own beef tallow from scratch. I’ve collected plenty of bacon grease in my day, and I’ve made schmaltz and used beef drippings from roasts as cooking fats, but never beef tallow. In fact, I almost never hear about it, even in Primal circles. It’s either lard, duck fat, or ghee getting all the attention. Hey, those are all great, delicious fats, and they deserve their prestige, but I like sticking up for the little guy. I like an underdog. In this case, of course, the little guy comes courtesy of a big cloven-hoofed ungulate.

To render beef tallow, you need to get your hands on some raw beef fat.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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A Primal Primer: Animal Fats

Animal fats have recently been implicated as the cause of heart disease, obesity and, in a roundabout convoluted stretch of logic, global warming. If you let health officials tell it, they’re pure evil. Reviled, shunned, and lambasted by the general public (thanks to less-then-sterling endorsements by health officials), animal fats have really gotten a bad rap.

It wasn’t always this way.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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Rapid Fire Q&A: Fish Oil Guide Follow-Up

You guys had tons of questions following last week’s Definitive Guide to Fish Oils. Since the back and forth discourse is my favorite part of doing the blog, I’ll see if I can get to all of them. Let me know if I miss anything!

You recommend storing fish oil in the fridge, but how about storing capsules in the freezer? Wouldn’t this be an even better step to take to prevent the oil from oxidizing?

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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