The Primal Blueprint (5 page)

Americans will always do the right thing—after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives
.

—
Winston Churchill

I’m going to ask you to forget most everything you thought you knew about diet, exercise, and health. There is a distressing amount of
flawed Conventional Wisdom
that confuses, misleads, manipulates, and complicates even the most devoted efforts to do the right thing: eat healthfully, exercise effectively, control weight, and avoid today’s incredibly common health conditions like obesity, arthritis, indigestion, insomnia, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

In the
Primal Blueprint
, you will learn why eating a low-fat diet rich in grains like wheat, rice, bread, pasta, and cereal can easily make you fat and malnourished. You’ll learn why millions of joggers and gym-goers put in the time and effort to lose weight yet routinely compromise their health and accelerate the aging process as a direct result of their devotion to fitness. You’ll learn why cholesterol level and saturated fat intake are
not
the major risk factors for heart disease that we have been led to believe and why a relatively high-fat diet promotes health and longevity. I’ll show how weight loss does not have to involve the suffering, sacrifice, and deprivation we’ve been conditioned to accept but instead is a matter of eating the right foods (plants and animals), avoiding the wrong foods (processed carbs—including grains—and trans and partially hydrogenated fats), and exercising strategically, for far fewer hours than you might assume, to reach your desired fitness goals.

All the answers are found in a set of 10 simple, logical diet, exercise, and lifestyle behaviors that I call the
Primal Blueprint
. Modeling your 21st-century life after our primal hunter-gatherer ancestors will help you greatly reduce or eliminate almost all of the disease risk factors that you may falsely blame on genes you inherited from your parents. Unfortunately, too many of us narrowly define genes as largely unalterable inherited traits—height, body type, eye color, physical or intellectual abilities, and “family history” health conditions and diseases. While some genes are indeed responsible for traits that are largely unaffected by lifestyle, many more play a bigger role in your health than you might realize. As coming chapters explain in detail, your genes—guided by what you eat, how you move, and even how you think—are the traffic cops that direct the functioning of every single cell in your body, every moment of every day.

“
Instead of falling victim to your genetic vulnerabilities, you can control how your genes express themselves in constantly rebuilding, repairing, and renewing your cells
.
”

Whatever you throw at them, your genes are going to respond in an effort to promote survival and, beyond that, homeostasis (the balanced and synchronistic
functioning of all systems in the body). After all, this is the essence of human evolution. From a philosophical perspective, the
Primal Blueprint
does not presume to declare a right versus wrong way to live your life. Your body will still valiantly pursue homeostasis and survival when you sit on the couch downing Cheetos and Dr. Pepper. I am merely presenting the steps you can take to reprogram your genes to trigger
desirable gene expression
and achieve—as the cover suggests—“effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy.” By following the
Primal Blueprint
laws, you can be the best that your genes allow you to be. What better definition of
vibrant health
is there?

The idea that we can reprogram our genes through lifestyle behavior constitutes the central premise of this book. It also represents a clear departure from today’s fatalistic Conventional Wisdom, which suggests that our genes, for better or worse, determine our destiny and that we have little say in the matter…unless prescription drugs or the Human Genome Project can come to the rescue. True, you might have a genetic tendency toward accumulating excess body fat or a family history of type 2 diabetes, but you’ll be more likely to see these traits expressed when you make poor lifestyle choices and send the wrong signals to your genes. Instead of falling victim to your genetic vulnerabilities, you can control how your genes express themselves in constantly rebuilding, repairing, and renewing your cells. Briefly, here are the most critical, life-altering elements of the
Primal Blueprint
:

Ramp Up Your Fat Metabolism
by eliminating processed carbohydrates from your diet to minimize your body’s insulin production. This means eliminating not only sugars and sweets but grain products, including wheat, rice, pasta, and corn (yep, corn is a grain, not a vegetable). A diet that emphasizes meat, fish, fowl, nuts, seeds, and colorful natural carbs, such as vegetables and fruits, is the primary way to improve your general health, control your weight, and minimize risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and other diet-influenced medical conditions. If you are carrying excess body fat, it will disappear virtually effortlessly when you focus on eating the delicious, filling, nutritious foods that have sustained humans throughout the course of evolution for two million years.

Optimize Your Exercise Program
by engaging in a genetically desirable blend of frequent, low-intensity energizing movement (walking, hiking, easy cardio), regular short, intense strength-training sessions, and occasional all-out sprints that help improve body composition and delay the aging process. This strategy is far superior to the Conventional Wisdom approach of following a consistent schedule of frequent medium-to-high–intensity sustained workouts, such as jogging, running, or cycling; cardio machines; or group classes. That workout plan—which I refer to derisively as
Chronic
Cardio
—places excessive and prolonged physical stress on your body, which inevitably leads to fatigue, injuries, compromised immune function, and burnout. Sometimes, less really is more.

Manage Stress Levels
with plenty of sleep, play, sunlight, fresh air, and creative outlets and by avoiding trauma that often arises from stupid mistakes. Rebel against the tremendous cultural momentum toward sedentary lifestyles, excessive digital stimulation, and insufficient rest. Honor your primal genes by slowing down and simplifying your life. Your ancestors worked hard to survive, but their regular respites from stress gave them the peace of mind and body that are so highly coveted today.

As you will soon discover, our genes were not only designed through evolution to keep us healthy, but they desperately
want
us to be healthy. Today, with the hectic pace of the high-tech modern world, we struggle with how to do the right thing by our genes. The ensuing failure creates a level of frustration and confusion that causes many of us, whether overtly or deep down inside, simply to give up. Experience teaches us how difficult it is, if not impossible, to be lean, fit, energetic, and healthy following Conventional Wisdom. Instead, we succumb to the forces of consumerism designed to placate our pain with silly shortcuts, comforts, conveniences, and indulgences. Consequently, the popular “Hey man, life is short!” rationalization becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The consequences of eating processed foods, exercising excessively (or, conversely, being inactive), and making poor lifestyle decisions work in concert against our genetic mandate for health. At the very least, we can experience excess body fat storage, subpar fitness results, aching joints, gastrointestinal problems, frequent minor illnesses, sugar cravings, energy level swings, and recurring fatigue. Sounds bad enough as it is, but continuing to mismanage your genes with bad choices over years and decades will likely result in obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and/or the vast majority of degenerative conditions requiring a doctor’s care or medication. A huge percentage of all doctor visits today are a direct consequence of lifestyle choices that are misaligned with the environmental and survival conditions that shaped our primal genetic makeup.

These consequences are painfully obvious to most everyone, and our collective interest in doing the right thing has driven a booming fitness industry, incredible advancements in medicine, much greater awareness of healthy foods and lifestyle choices, sharp declines in smoking, and sharp increases in restaurants offering salad bars and smoothies. Ironically though, the collective health of America—and other Western countries that have adopted our fast-paced culture—is worse than ever. A study released in 2008 by Johns Hopkins University suggests that by the year 2030, 86 percent of all
adults in the United States will be overweight or obese (up from the current estimate of 65 percent); what’s more, a National Institutes of Health conference report stated that “our trends predict that
all
Americans will be obese by 2230!”

“
Physician and author Dr. Deepak Chopra asserts that organs and tissues have the ability to last 115 to 130 years before they fail due to aging
.
”

We reluctantly accept as fact that the normal human life span consists of growing up to reach a physical peak in your early 20s, followed by an inevitable steady decline caused by the aging process. Under this faulty assumption, we allow ourselves to gain an average of one and a half pounds of fat per year starting at age 25 and continuing through age 55
¹
(we also lose half a pound of muscle per year, resulting in adding a pound a year in the wrong places as we age). Our last decade or two (until we reach the average life span of about 78 years)
²
is usually characterized by inactivity, excess body fat, assorted medical conditions, and a host of prescription drugs to alleviate the pain and symptoms of chronic disease. Twenty-seven percent of us will die from cardiovascular disease, and another 23 percent will die from cancer.
³