July
2008
The Definitive Guide to the Primal Eating Plan
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Do the Math
In my recent Context of Calories post, I explained how the different macronutrients we eat at each meal (fats, proteins, and carbohydrates) have different effects in the body. I suggested that, despite their raw calorie values, it’s far more important to get a lasting intuitive sense of how much of each macronutrient you need and when you need it (or not).
But how do you do that? How do you figure out the proper number of calories - and breakdown of fats, protein and carbs - to accomplish your fitness and health goals? To lose weight? Lose fat? Gain muscle? Maintain status quo? Run marathons?
In fact, most popular daily diets look at overall calories as the main factor in weight loss and weight gain. The age-old conservation of energy Conventional Wisdom says that “a calorie is a calorie.” From there most diet gurus generally prescribe some formulaic one-size-fits-all breakdown of fats, protein and carbs. A classically trained Registered Dietician will tell you that protein should be around 10-15% of calories, carbs should be 60% (and mostly from whole grains) and fat under 30%. This macronutrient breakdown stays the same regardless of how much weight you need to lose or what other goals you might have. Barry Sears has his 40/30/30 “Zone” diet. The USDA bases everything on a choice of between 2,000 and 2,500 calories a day. But, as I said earlier, it’s not that simple. Calories do have context.
The human body uses these macronutrients for a variety of different functions, some of which are structural and some of which are simply to provide energy - immediately or well into the future. Moreover, with regards to energy conservation or expenditure, the body acts as both an efficient fuel storage depot (and as a toxic “waist” site) as well as a potent generator of energy, depending largely on the hormonal signals it gets. It will store glycogen and/or fat and it will build muscle - or it will just as easily tear them all down and use them for fuel - based on input from you: what you eat, how much you eat, when you eat, what you’re doing before or after you eat - even what you’re thinking when you eat. Yet because your body always seeks to achieve homeostasis over time, the notion of you trying to zero in on a precise day-to-day or meal-to-meal eating plan is generally fruitless (yes, Charlotte, some fruit is allowed). The good news in all this is that falling off the wagon once or twice this week won’t have the immediate disastrous effect that you might imagine - as long as you can keep your average intake under control and understand how the various macronutrients function over time.
Which brings me to the crux of today’s discussion. Not only is it nearly impossible to accurately gauge your exact meal-to-meal calorie and macronutrient requirements, doing so will drive you crazy. In fact, to accurately figure your true structural and functional fuel needs (and hence to achieve your goals) it’s far more effective to look at a much larger span of time, like a few weeks, and aim for an “average” consumption. Then you can review that average daily intake over weeks or months and adjust accordingly. Below, I’ll give you a way to figure a “jumping off” point to start with, but remember, our genes are accustomed to the way our ancestors ate: intermittently, sporadically, sometimes in large quantities, and sometimes not at all for days. Their bodies figured out a way to maintain homeostasis and preserve lean tissue and good health through all this and so can we. Our genes want us to be lean and fit. It’s actually quite easy as long as we eat from the long list of Primal Blueprint healthy foods and try to avoid that other list of grain-laden, sugary, processed and otherwise unhealthy foods. Realistically, we also want to allow for the occasional party-splurge, a pre-planned (or accidental) intermittent fast, an over-the-top workout or even a week of laziness. Where most people get into trouble is in miscalculating their energy needs over extended periods of time - not day-to-day. They don’t see the average amount of carbs creeping upwards, or they figure they need x amount of calories, but don’t have a clue as to what kind of food those should be coming from.
I start with these four basic principles to guide my Primal Blueprint eating style:
1) 80% of your body composition will be determined by your diet. Yes, exercise is also important to health and to speed up fat-burning and muscle-building, but most of your results will come from how you eat. I’ll write more on this later, so just trust me on this one for now. Suffice to say, people who weigh a ton and exercise a ton, but eat a ton, still tend to weigh a ton. I think I’ll have that made into a t-shirt…
2) Lean Body Mass (LBM) is the key to life. I’ve said it many times on this site: lean mass (muscle and all the rest of you that is not fat) is directly correlated with longevity and excellent health. Rather than strive to “lose weight”, most people would be better off striving to lose only fat and to build or maintain muscle. Since other organs tend to function at a level that correlates to muscle mass, the more muscle you maintain throughout life, the more “organ reserve” you’ll have (i.e. the better the rest of you will work). Refer back to rule #1 and eat to build or maintain muscle.
3) Excess body fat is bad. Most human studies show that being significantly overweight increases your risk of nearly every disease (except osteoporosis - because ironically it responds to weight-bearing activities). Fat just doesn’t look that great either. See rule #1 and eat to keep body fat relatively low.
4) Excess insulin is bad. We’ve written about it here a lot. Chronic excess insulin may be even worse than excess sugar (and we know how bad that is). All animals produce insulin, but within any species, those that produce less insulin live longer than those who produce a lot. Eat to keep insulin low.
Here is how I use these principles to guide my individual macronutrient intake:
Protein
Protein takes priority. If there is ample glycogen (stored glucose) and the body is getting the rest of its energy efficiently from fats, protein will always go first towards repair or building cells or enzymes. In that context, it hardly seems fair to assign it a “burn rate” of 4 calories per gram. It’s like saying the 2×4 studs that support the walls of your house can burn nicely if you run out of firewood. They will, but I prefer to burn other fuel first. At a minimum you need .5 grams of protein per pound of lean mass/per day on average to maintain your “structure”. If you are moderately active you need .7 or .8, and if you are an active athlete you need as much as 1 gram of protein per pound of lean mass. That’s at a minimum, but it’s on a daily average. So a 155 lb moderately active woman who has 25% body fat (and thus) has 116 lb of lean body mass needs 93 grams of protein on average per day (116 x .8). If she gets 60 or 80 some days and 110 on others, she’ll still be in a healthy average range. And even if she exceeds the 110, it’s no problem if she’s eating low carb because the excess protein will convert to glucose, which will reduce her effective carbohydrate needs (see below). At 4 calories per gram, that’s between 320 and 440 calories per day in protein. It’s not that much.
Carbs
If you’ve forgotten everything you ever learned in biology, just remember this and “own” it: Carbohydrate drives insulin drives fat (Cahill 1965, and Taubes 2007). The idea in the PB is to limit your carbs to only those you need to provide glucose for the brain and for some reasonable amount (certainly less than an hour) of occasional anaerobic exercise. And the truth is, you don’t even need glucose to fuel the brain. Ketones from a very-low carb diet work extremely efficiently at that task. Either way, ideally, we would like most of our daily energy to come from dietary or stored fats. Typically, (if you are at an ideal body composition now) I use a rule of thumb that 100-150 grams of carbohydrate per day is plenty to keep you out of ketosis (and ketosis is NOT a bad thing) but away from storing the excess as fat if you are the least bit active. Don’t forget that your body can make up to 200 grams of glycogen from fats and protein every day, too. On the other hand, if you are looking to lose body fat, keeping carbs to under 80 grams per day will help immensely in lowering insulin and taking fat out of storage. On the other other hand, if you are insistent on training hard for long periods of time, you would add more carbs (say, 100 per day extra for every extra hour you train hard). It becomes a matter of doing the math and experimenting with the results.
Ironically, it’s tough to exceed 100 grams of carbs even if you eat tons of colorful vegetables - as long as you eat like our ancestors and consume no grains, no sugars and few starchy vegetables (potatoes, yams, beets, legumes, etc). Even if you eat a ton of vegetables AND a fair amount of fruit, you’ll be hard pressed to exceed 150 grams of carbs on average per day. Our remote ancestors couldn’t average 150 grams of carbs a day if they tried, yet they had plenty of energy and maintained their lean mass. At 4 calories per gram that’s only between 400 and 600 calories per day. Add that in to the protein above and our sample girl is barely at 1,000 calories on the high end. So where does the rest of the fuel come from?
Fats
Learn to love them. They are the fuel of choice and should become the balance of your Primal Blueprint diet. Fats have little or no impact on insulin and, as a result, promote the burning of both dietary and stored (adipose) fat as fuel. Think about this: if protein and carbs stay fairly constant (and carbs stay under 150), you can use fat as the major energy variable in your diet. Feeling like you need more fuel (and you’ve already covered your bases with protein and carbs)? Reach for something with fat. Nuts, avocados, coconut, eggs, butter, olive oil, fish, chicken, lamb, beef, the list is a long one. 100 grams of fats per day would only add 900 calories to our girl’s daily average, putting her at between 1620 and 1940 calories a day. Even if she averages somewhere between 1400 and 2200 calories per day over a few weeks, as long as she pays attention to protein and carbs, her body composition will shift to lower body fat and more desirable lean mass. If she decides to do some walking, a few brief intense weight sessions and a sprint day here and there, that process would accelerate greatly. If she gets to a point where she’s content with her body fat, she can even add in a little more fat to provide energy that she previously got from her stored fat.
The main thing I’ve figured out from eating this way for years is that I don’t need nearly as many calories to maintain health, mass, and body fat as I once thought I did - or as the Conventional Wisdom says I do. I eat 600-1000 calories per day less than when I ate a carbohydrate-based diet, yet I maintain slightly lower body fat and slightly higher muscle mass on even less training. Remember: 80% of body composition is determined by diet. The best part is that I don’t ever feel hungry because I base my eating on exactly what my 10,000-year-old genes want me to eat.
Further Reading:
Definitive Guides to:
Insulin, Blood Sugar and Type 2 Diabetes
Stress, Cortisol and the Adrenals
Good piece Mark. Question for you:
What about the insulogenic effects of protein? Peter at Hyperlipid* favors fats over proteins, if I am not mistaken, for this (among other) reasons.
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2008/01/what-do-i-eat-fitday-analysis.html
Hyperlipid is a great blog BTW.
So some one wonting to lose a lot of fat say 120 lbs can do it on 80 gram’s of carbs a day?that’s way to high to calm the insulin down because the truth be told carb’s are non essential to the human diet.All carb’s do even veggies is flood the blood strem with insulin to make you fat and store it as fat.Is this true i dunno can someone explain to a guy who get’s easly confussed.Because the body only has so much room to store carbs in the liver and muscles.
Bill,
Depends on your goals and how agreesive you want to be. I said “under 80″ grams, meaning that is a high-end number. If you shoot for 20-50 grams a day, I guarantee you’ll lose the fat. But even if you were at 120 grams a day, you’d lose fat (provided you keep calories under control) just at a slower pace.
Varangy,
I really like what Peter does at hyperlipid in terms of self-experimentation and research. He is definitely on the leading edge of the “truly high fat” diet.
I agree that protein can have insulinegenic properties and that excess protein can be converted to glucose, but I still feel that it’s better to err on the side of a little too much protein (especially if you train intensely on occasion. Don’t recall that Peter trains intensely ever, but I could be wrong. And the micronutrient benefits of fruits and vegetables can’t be overstated either.
Thanks Mark.
I know this site has discussed nightshades occasionally but what are your thoughts on plant poisons/toxins?
http://www.plantpoisonsandrottenstuff.info/content/toxins.aspx
Excellent post as always Mark.
I’ve been gradually lowering my carbs a little more each week.
I’m going to reanalyze everything this week via FitDay, but I’d estimate I’m down to about 100-150, with ALL of them coming from whole, natural foods.
Varangy,
Most plants have some type of toxin that acts as a defense mechanism. Some are worse than others, but if we avoided all plants for that reason, we would perish.
As for nightshades. some are worse than others and some people are more susceptible that others. I would suspect that many of today’s bell peppers, for instance, are bred for color and sweetness and retain very little of the potentially offending alkyloids found in wilder versions. Same for tomatoes. And, having said that, I would still probably moderate my consumption of these, since they are but a small portion of the overall menu in the vegetable world.
Love what you said about tracking your macronutrient ratios and calories over the course of several weeks and adjusting them based on your goals. very sensible advice that gets lost amidst all the calorie screaming in the media. Also loved your emphasis (again) that calories DO have a context.
One question tho (and I’m sure I’m reading you wrong) but when you said that you now eat 600-1000 less calories per day than when you were higher carb but still maintain a healthy physique it sounds to me like most people would say “so I can eat 600-1000 MORE cals per day if I incorporate carbs? And still maintain a healthy phsyique?” Is that just because you were training harder and burning more cals then?
The main problem I have with continuing to increase my protein and fat consumption is that commonly available meat is of such low quality. The feedlot and industrial produced meat we buy at our supermarkets is from animals that have been abused, pumped full of chemicals and fed any number of really nasty Things.
How many of us have the resources to seek out top quality grass-fed and naturally raised meat?
The other reason is that I decided to embrace the Primal or Paleolithic eating system because I’m very leery of theory spinning regarding what is best for our bodies. Instead I’d like to emulate the diet that my distant ancestors ate since, by definition, that is the diet my body evolved on.
It’s very hard to determine exactly what Paleolithic man ate and in what proportions. But every single hunter-gatherer society that we have encountered has eaten a wide variety of plant foods unless plant foods simply weren’t available. Most hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied, people who live in a way very similar to the way our Paleolithic ancestors are thought to have lived, gather and eat a great variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and tubers.
The Inuit lived entirely off animal products because that’s all that was available. The Masai eat mostly dairy but this is a post-paleolithic adaptation to an extremely arid environment. These are the exceptions. In general, we have no reason at all to think that ancient man limited his diet to meat by choice. In fact when hunting was scarce, as it probably often was, he is likely to have lived almost entirely off of nuts and tubers.
So, in my view at least, when we try to cut carbs down to almost nothing we are not necessarily trying to emulate the primal diet. Instead we are experimenting, much like the guy at Hyper-Lipid admits he is doing. But, personally, at this point I’d rather try to actually emulate the typical Paleolithic diet rather than embark on an experimental super-low carb regime.
I’ve been reading MDA for a while now, I’ve never really taken the PB to be ‘low carb’ in the stereotypical ‘low carb’ way. In fact, I’ve read several times that Mark puts vegatables at the base of the PB food pyramid. Take my Fitday for today (crustless spinach quiche, monster kitchen sink salad, and I’m planning to have a handful of almonds if I have time and then salmon and asparagus for dinner). Comes out to only 63 grams carbs, 114 grams protein, 86 grams fat (hello homemand olive oil dressing!) I don’t often track on Fitday, but this post made me curious. Believe me, I’ve eaten a ton of veggies today (even had a co-worker ask ‘Are you really going to eat all that?’ when I got ready to eat my lunch salad), but total carbs still come out pretty low. To my mind, the PB is NOT low carb, it is eating whole, unprocessed foods; simple, sane concept.
But every single hunter-gatherer society that we have encountered has eaten a wide variety of plant foods unless plant foods simply weren’t available. Most hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied, people who live in a way very similar to the way our Paleolithic ancestors are thought to have lived, gather and eat a great variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and tubers.
1) As one of my anthro professors noted, it is common mistake to equate contemporary or near-contemporary hunter-gatherers with our paleolithic ancestors.
They are not one and the same — and these hunter-gatherers most likely do not make good proxies for paleolithic humans. For example, I do not think that Paleolithic humans had much access to fruits, vegetables and nuts (some tubers excepted) — most if not all of what we know as contemporary fruits and vegetables are distant modern and most importantly, considerably domesticated (read: sweeter), cousins of wild plants - same goes for animals as well.
Therefore, one must be careful in drawing conclusions based on hunter-gatherer behavior.
2) One issue I have not seen discussed on this site with regard to low carb/paleo eating is sleep.
I, sample size (n = 1), have radically improved my sleep. I used to suffer from racing thoughts and restlessness many a night — now I can actually lay down and get a restful night’s sleep.
This newfound return to normalcy correlates directly with my hybrid hyperlipid/low carb/paleo style eating — is it responsible for it? Maybe.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Varangy-
n=2
I used to think I was doomed to a lifetime of restless nights. I’ve been Primal for 4 months now and have seen vast improvements. I still have trouble getting to sleep every once in awhile (which seems to correlate with straying from Primal eating) but most nights I sleep like a baby. Everything is connected. Get the big things right and it is sort of like a domino effect. Everything begins to fall into place.
“Fats have little or no impact on insulin and, as a result, promote the burning of both dietary and stored (adipose) fat as fuel”.
Mark, I am sorry to have to ask you this (I am knew here) but I have been told all my life that fat is exactly what is sounds like, fat! Now you are espousing the belief, and I can see that you have done your homework, that I can have 120 grams of fat and still lose weight??? I just don’t see how that is possible? Can you put into simple terms how this works?
Jen
@Jen C.
Not to answer on behalf of Mark, but we have all suffered under the massive mis-information cascade of ‘low-fat’ diets. Read Gary Taubes’s book for a fantastic review.
8. We get fat because of an imbalance—a disequilibrium—in the hormonal regulation of fat tissue and fat metabolism. More fat is stored in the fat tissue than is mobilized and used for fuel. We become leaner when the hormonal regulation of the fat tissue reverses this imbalance.
9. Insulin is the primary regulator of fat storage. When insulin levels are elevated, we stockpile calories as fat. When insulin levels fall, we release fat from our fat tissue and burn it for fuel.
10. By stimulating insulin secretion, carbohydrates make us fat and ultimately cause obesity. By driving fat accumulation, carbohydrates also increase hunger and decrease the amount of energy we expend in metabolism and physical activity.
11. The fewer carbohydrates we eat, the leaner we will be.
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400040780
The old fashioned notion was that the your body simply burned calories as they were consumed and stored the excess as fat. But the body is actually a much more complex machine than that.
In simple terms the body will store fat when it is in fat storage mode. When it is not in fat storage mode excess calories simply pass through or burn off. It seems that anything that spikes your insulin, mainly simple carbs and sugars, will tend to move the body into fat storage mode.
In Dr. Steven Gundry’s new book “The Diet Evolution” he goes into this in detail. He says that when we eat a great mass of sugars or carbs the body’s hormonal system concludes that it must be autumn when the fruit is ripe and plants are richest and starts to move into what he calls “store fat for winter” mode.
But with modern processed food people are always eating tons of simple carbs and thus they are always in “store fat for winter” mode. This is the great fallacy of the low-fat diet theory. It tells you to avoid fat, which helps stabalize blood sugar and insulin levels, and eat more carbs which spike blood sugar and insulin. But low-fat and high carb will kick you into fat storage mode while high-fat and low-carb will tend to put you into “get lean for summer hunting” mode.
Charlotte, good question. When I ate carbs I did have to work out longer and harder…and then I had to eat more to replace the lost glycogen. A viscious cycle of working out more than I needed to and then eating more than I needed to. Life is much easier this way. I CAN get by on less, but as long as I keep carbs low, I can also eat more fat and not have it affect me. For a guy whose college buddies still call him “Arnold Ziffle” (after the pig on Green Acres, because I could eat so much) I marvel at how often I can cruise through a day without getting that hungry. Can’t do that on a high carb plan.
Varangy, when I was a carb eater, I would often not be able to sleep (among other reasons) because the accelerated beating of my endurance-trained heart would keep me awake as the blood pumped through my eardrums…seriously. That is no longer a problem, so I also sleep better. n=3
Mark,
there is a guy on jimmy moore’s forum named charles he eats 0 carb’s and is a marathon runner,i listened to his interview by jimmy it was interesting.Can someone survive on 0 carbs 0 fiber and 0 veggies.
Bill, I’ll check it out. YOu can live on zero carbs, but you’d have to be very careful what you ate (grassfed, organic, etc) and you’d definitely have to take a high-potency multi-vitamin. I think the fiber thing has been way over-done, so I wouldn’t be so concerned with taking a fiber supplement. 0 carbs is just a tough way to live…he also can’t be very fast as a marathoner.
Dear Mark,
I have embarked on my no grain “way of life”. I am keeping it low carb and adding in the fats to keep the ball rolling. I am scared to even take a bit of fruit however because I am not sure how the insulin thingy works. I want my body to burn fat efficiently and get off the carb burning roller coaster. Can you give me an idea of how I am able to add any carbs (that are not grains) but fruit ect. to my meal w/out raising my insulin and storing the fat I am eating in my meal on my hips.
I have read that if I eat fat in my meals (which is great to do on low carb) then I eat carbs too my insulin can rise and cause fat storage. Is there a number of carbs to stay below in each meal? Is it possible to have say half and apple at my breakfast of 2 whole eggs, natural bacon and avacado.
Also, do you have a take on cheese on salads, whole cream in coffee, and yogurt plain with no sweetener…. Is dairy to be avoided at all costs like grains?
xoxo Autumn
125lb 5 foot 2 23%bf and currently living in brain fog (first 2 days of low carb so far)
Autumn, dairy is one of our “sensible vices”. Grok didn’t consume dairy, but many of us who don’t have lactose intolerance (or casein issues) can have a little refined or fermented dairy now and then. For that reason, a little feta on a salad, whole cream in coffee and the occasional Greek-style yogurt will be fine.
So what happens if I drink lots of 1% or skim milk? I’m lactose and casein tolerant, and put down between 1 and 2 quarts per day as a teenager. At 35, I still LOVE milk. What’s the effect of 16 or so ounces per day on top of low fat cheese, hormonally/biochemically speaking?
Susanne, maybe you are one of the few who can truly tolerate a ton of dairy. I’d be concerned if you are consuming that much factory-farmed, hormone-and-antibiotic-laden product, though.
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Mark,
I like the information here.. This is very similar to a “Paleolithic Diet” or Caveman Style Diet, which I endorse & write often about on JohnFit.COM Fitness Blog.. Fats have such high anti-inflammatory effects on the body that they make for “calming” features on your internal tissues.. Also, switching to this style of eating is great for a less bloated look and lean appearance.. My body fat stays around 8%, but I’ve noticed that I often look 10%+ from the bloating features of wheat and grain products.. This may also be linked to a “Wheat Allergy” that I have, but I think its a very common allergy & grade A red Flag for, “YOUR FEEDING SOMETHING TO YOUR BODY THATS ITS NOT MENT TO PROCESS”! So, I cut out the wheat products, and leave the breads on the shelf.. Not to mention, Gluten is a growing concern in our “Get Lean & Fit, while supporting immune system” eating lifestyle.. Bump up the fats, consolidate the carbs, and focus on becoming more organic.. I like to say, “If it doesn’t run, grow, &/or respond to sunlight” then don’t eat it.. Everything from improved skin conditions, shinier hair & healthier teeth, to shaving body fat & improving immune system fuctions will occur when you supplement this eating style into your new positive habit patterns.. Great article Bud.. I’m a fan!
John Fit..
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Hi Mark. Very interesting take on nutrition, and one I will be trying this year. In the past, I have been guilty for over-emphasizing carbs and taking in too little fat, mostly because I have been concerned with lacking the fuel needed for long workouts. Which brings me to my question: what exactly do you mean by training hard for long periods of time? For example, is it training more than 1 hour per day? 2 hours per day? I am an Ironman Triathlete so typically training is from 2 hours to 6 hours per day. Also, am I right in assuming that the extra 100g of carbs includes those taken in during exercising?
Thanks for all the information on your site!
Tammy
ps I feed my dog raw and she a thriving athletic machine!