Dear Mark: Contest Questions

For this week’s post I’m dipping into the hundreds of comments-questions I received for the Contest last month. Although I could highlight only a few for the winning set, I appreciated all your responses and will try to cover as many as possible in upcoming posts. Thanks, everybody!

Mark,

As part of my more primal lifestyle I’m trying to cut out carbs and eating more vegetables. I’m currently eating 5 cups of broccoli with 3oz of shrimp and olive oil with a pinch of salt as a meal. Here’s a link to the “recipe”. That’s a whopping 56 grams of carbs a meal. Is that too much carbs even if it’s coming from vegetables? I am fairly lean but am trying to burn a bit more fat.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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Who You Callin’ Stupid and Lazy?

A number of readers have sent me links (thanks, readers) to a new study coming out of the UK that raised some eyebrows all across the Internet earlier this week. The headlines seemed to scream from everywhere “Do High Fat Diets Make Us Stupid and Lazy?” That, in turn, made me scream, so I took a look at this paper in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology: Deterioration of physical performance and cognitive function in rats with short-term high-fat feeding

What I found was a less-than-impressive short-term study on rat performance that told me what I already knew: that it takes a while for new gene expression to really kick in when you radically shift diets. Just like some of you are seeing in the 30-day challenge. So what?

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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Contest Results: Q&A with Mark

Congratulations to Ed, Wyatt, Ken, VN, and Dan. You have won copies of The Primal Blueprint.

As Aaron mentioned, we received nearly 250 fantastic questions. I could spend the next few months writing blog posts to address these questions exclusively. Needless to say, I’ll be using the comment board as a source of future MDA fodder, so check back often for answers to all of your questions.

What do you think of this video? It was our first time doing it this way, so it was a bit of an experiment. Do you like the format? There are a number of things I’d do differently in the future, but if you generally enjoy video content let me know and I’ll see about making this a regular feature of the blog.

Speaking of multi-media features on Mark’s Daily Apple, what does everyone think of a podcast? Would you be inclined to listen to an internet radio program in which I answer reader questions, hold interviews and discuss the Primal lifestyle? It’s just in the idea phase now, so I’d like to get a feeling for whether you’d be interested before putting it all together.

Thanks again to everyone for participating in this contest. Grok on!

Subscribe to Mark’s Daily Apple feeds

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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10 Baby Steps to Help You “Get Primal”

For this month’s 30-day challenge, we realize that everyone is starting from a different place. As much as we learn from our hardcore Grokkers, we welcome Primal newcomers with open arms and eager ears. We want to know their stories, their challenges, and the strategies that finally make it work for them. Some of us are the type to jump in the deep end of the pool and figure it out when we get to the bottom. Others of us dip our toes, scan the ladder placements, and study the grade of floor depth. Different strokes, we say.

Even as we accept that our own Primal journey will be different from the next person’s, it can be a little awkward or discouraging to be the one feeling out the shallow end while others are doing flips and belly flops in the deep side of the pool. We thought a post on baby-stepping, breaking down the transition into small and very manageable steps, might come in handy for many of our readers – newcomers, renewers, or even old-timers who are coaching friends and family in a Primal direction. Kick back and get brainstorming for your next baby step!

Posted By: Worker Bee

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How to Succeed with the Primal Blueprint

So you’ve decided to join the challenge. You’ve created your own Primal Challenge Journal and have publicly stated your goals for the next month. Now what? First things first. You have to know the basics. If you’re new to the Primal Blueprint the following article will be like gold to you. Revisit it again and again until you’ve committed the concepts to memory. The graphs and charts are visual representations of the principles that are at the core of the Primal health philosophy and give you a taste of what it is in my new book, The Primal Blueprint.

You’ve defined the “what”. If your goal is to lose weight, build muscle, increase energy or just generally look and feel healthier these graphics explain the basics of the “how”.

The Primal Blueprint Carbohydrate Curve

What’ll It Be? The “Sweet Spot” or the “Danger Zone”?

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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