"I spent untold thousands of dollars on the "best" foods and supplements, trying to get an antioxidant or immune boost that can be had for free when you simply skip breakfast." --Mark Sisson
Good introduction/primer for anyone interested in intermittent fasting and HIIT-style exercise. This book is too basic for anyone who is already practicing these domains, although it contains many good reminders and useful concepts for review for the intermediate/advanced practitioner.
The book also offers helpful reminders and practices for mindfulness, meta-awareness of one's mental and emotional state, cues that signal overtraining, etc.
Also a good articulation of the various flaws in traditional/government-approved dietary and health guidelines and why they're flawed, while offering better, more explanatory dietary hypotheses and eating recommendations. Again, this will be review material for anyone already conversant in these topics, but still a useful review nonetheless.
Notes:
* We have to give up the flawed "lipid hypothesis of heart disease" which erroneously blames dietary cholesterol and saturated fat for causing heart disease.
* To deal with jet lag: fast on the day of the flight, arrive at your destination, stay active until bedtime, do not eat, then eat your first meal the following morning. This calibrates your digestive and circadian rhythms to the new time zone.
* Gratitude journaling
* Homeostasis (your body has a set point) and compensation theory (calories burned in exercise are offset by an increase in appetite as well as a reduction in caloric expenditure later in the day) explaining why the "calories in, calories out" theory of obesity fails. Instead, fasting and insulin levels are what drives weight gain or loss.
Chapter 1: clean up your act
* The Big Three toxic modern foods: sugars, grains, refined industrial seed oils.
* Cephalic response: thinking about food actually makes your digestive tract begin working.
Chapter 2: emphasize nutrient-dense ancestral foods
* Multiple pages about chocolate.
* "Use unprocessed pink Himalayan salt or ancient sea salt instead of iodized salt to get the benefit of dozens of additional minerals." Followed by a completely unnecessary warning about hyponatremia and the dangers of drinking water out of plastic bottles "at the very least, resolve to never allow your food or drink to touch plastic." This kind of stuff really irritates me as a reader.. it's insight-free, and it shows that even the paleo people stoop to modernity's consensus alarmism.
* Also the overt productization of health food supplements. The author can't help it: every few pages he recommends some supplement ("twenty to thirty grams per day of a collagen peptide supplement"). Setting aside the fact that a collagen peptide supplement is quite the opposite of "ancestral eating," this is just another example of things that the "health food industry" can productize and sell to us, and we feel obligated to try them and consume them and draw some alleged connection between that and some effect on our bodies ("gee ever since I got that reverse osmosis system/started drinking organic dry farmed sugar-free low alcohol red wine/begin adding pink Himalayan sea salt to the water I drink/etc I feel much much better"). Trust me: in any list of things there will be a thing that you'll try and think works.
Chapter 3 intermittent eating
* Fasting is free! It is the only thing in the entire diet industry that doesn't involve buying something. Maybe that's why not many people try to "sell" the idea of fasting.
* Fasting is only a source of deprivation if you live in the carbohydrate dependency paradigm. Your ability to fast is a function of your metabolic flexibility.
* "I spent untold thousands of dollars on the "best" foods and supplements, trying to get an antioxidant or immune boost that can be had for free when you simply skip breakfast." (!!!)
* Good primer on fasting, although Art de Vany's book is better... Also you have to tolerate CYA caveat sections like "Females and Fasting."Standard recommendations of 16/8 or 18/6.
* On mindsets, gratitude, habits and behavior patterns: this chapter is review for anyone who has done sufficient reading on habit formation (see James Clear's Atomic Habits for example) self-fulfilling and self-sabotaging beliefs (see any of the works of Martin Seligman or Albert Ellis) and mindset formation (Carol Dweck's book would be useful here). But it's a good introduction to the topic for people unfamiliar with the domain, and offers readers plenty of additional reading to pursue. Regardless of your familiarity with the domain, this is one of these topics that it never hurts to get a quick refresher. As such it's a useful chapter.
Chapter 5: follow a fat burning lifestyle
* Complimentary lifestyle practices
* Sleep quality, preparing for bed
* Rest, recovery and downtime: avoiding jamming your day with activity; avoiding more, more, more; dopamine fasting, etc. See also The Hacking of the American Mind by Robert Lustig.
* Increase general everyday movement, just fucking walk: interesting point here about ergonomic chairs and custom fitted workstations: "they keep you more comfortable, so you remain sedentary for much longer before noticing the adverse effects!"
* See also Mark Sisson's archetypal rest postures on YouTube.
* Comfortably paced cardiovascular workouts, brief intense workouts, strength training, sprinting. Useful insights here on staying within your MAF, 180bpm minus your age... These workouts make you fitter but don't break down your body.
* "Microworkouts" as opposed to prolonged heavy duty depleting workouts: do a series of pull-ups between cognitive tasks, or squats or stairs or push-ups or whatever.
* Balancing progress and recovery: interesting paradigm here to think about three types of workouts:
1) break even: where you maintain your fitness with comfortable, moderate effort
2) breakthrough: where you're 100% rested and energized and do a challenging enough workout to stimulate a fitness improvement
3) recovery: easy workouts that require less effort so that they are truly restorative
* Easy to super easy recovery sessions contribute to your fitness because they make you more resilient for difficult workouts.
* Negative emotions as an indicator of overtraining.
Chapter 6: put two meals a day into play
* Gradually progressing into a 16-8 eating window.
* Delaying your first meal of the day until "WHEN" (when hunger ensues naturally). The progression should feel natural, comfortable, and easy. This takes you to fat-burning rather than glucose burning, away from carbohydrate dependency.
* "It's impossible to free yourself from obsession with and attachment to food when you are literally dependent on regular meals for energy." Why frequent eating is not good for you and why a carb based diet is terrible for you.
Chapter 7: advanced strategies for fat reduction
* "Embracing hunger once in a while also gives me a renewed appreciation for the beauty of meal times and eating delicious food."
* Fasted workouts: wait 1 to 4 hours before eating after exercising in a fasted state
* Extended fasting: up to 24 hours and then beyond.
* Sprinting as an excellent tool for fat burning and fat reduction.
* Cold exposure
The 12 Day Turbocharge
This is a really good gradual exposure to intermittent fasting, restocking your pantry, introducing paleo/ancestral exercise, and incorporating mindfulness into your daily activities. Very useful for anyone new to these domains, but too beginner for anyone who already has practical familiarity with them.
Recipes:
Most of the recipes are forgettable but two caught my eye: Sheet Pan Sausage and Cabbage:
...and Moroccan Lamb Stew (page 236):
For Further Reading:
Finally, there's an excellent list of resources for suggested reading with dozens of worthwhile titles for furthering your defiance of modernity.
