Primal Blueprint Podcast

For all our social and technological advancements, it seems we’re increasingly stuck in an unfortunate cul-de-sac of our own making. Shouldn’t we be beyond this by now? How is it that we can’t seem to innovate, design, reason or hack our way into a better collective work-life balance? (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

A lack of confidence can naturally present a big obstacle when you’re trying to overhaul your diet and lifestyle or take up new fitness challenges. No matter what your specific goal, a healthy dose of self-confidence is pretty key to getting the job done. For the days when it feels like the motivational well is dry, let’s look at some ways we can shore up our store of confidence. (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Hashimoto's disease, hypothyroidism, and Reverse T3 hypothyroidism are on the rise. Yet too many doctors are uninformed on how to diagnose and treat the various nuances behind thyroid disorders—leaving millions of patients un-diagnosed or hypothyroid and symptomatic, despite being on thyroid hormone replacement.  Dr. Gary E. Foresman, MD, is not only a Primal doctor well-versed in all things paleo/primal, but an informed integrative physician who Elle Russ chose to interview for her book, The Paleo Thyroid Solution. When Dr. Foresman opened a private practice, he quickly became dissatisfied with the inability of established Western medical treatments to effectively treat many of his patients—many of which suffered from thyroid disorders. Determined to help his patients, he began investigating alternative therapies and has since expanded his training in many systems of healing—not just through Ayurveda, meditation, and stress management, but also using botanical, orthomolecular and functional medicine systems.

When it comes to stress, the most pressing issue is how we take care of it. When we’re talking about pressure, however, the question is how we will meet it. Let’s look at some Grok-style Primal examples, shall we? (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Things have been busy for the Primal Endurance movement since I released the book back in December. People have been eager to learn more about this novel form of training, so we’ve been answering a lot of questions. Much like how The Primal Blueprint received a lot of attention because it bucked against Conventional Wisdom, such has been the case for Primal Endurance. Lots of head scratching, balking, but then, after learning the science and seeing the results, a healthy curiosity or full blown conversion. So what’s Primal Endurance training all about? What are the fundamentals? Who’s practicing it? And where can you learn more about it? (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Host Elle Russ sits down with longtime friend and Paleo Thyroid Solution Cara Haun. Cara was mistreated with Synthroid (T4-only/Levothyroxine) for hypothyroidism by an uninformed endocrinologist for eight years, and during that time suffered from miscarriages, asthma, a variety of food and other rare allergies—along with weight gain, depression, and severe exhaustion. Finally, another doctor (a D.O.) tested her thyroid properly and took an in-depth vitamin/mineral/antioxidant blood test. The results were shocking. The D.O. discovered Cara not only had Hashimoto's disease but that due to her endocrinologists's failure to diagnose her properly—combined with medical mistreatment over eight years, Cara had developed the immune profile of someone who had just gone through chemotherapy! Cara immediately ditched her endocrinologist in favor of a new doctor who started her on a compounded T4/T3 hormone combination, along with supplements, to support her drastically low mineral and nutrient levels. Cara's health was f

Sure, some of us are inevitably more drawn to competition than others, and we all gather energy from a unique mix of internal and external motivation. Nonetheless, we’re all born with the basic wiring. Competition is part of the human story after all. As a species, we’ve been propelled forward by the competitive edge time and again. Survival of the fittest may not mean as much in today’s world, but it was the principle that governed humanity’s evolution through the ages. (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

A new study just out introduces another wrinkle: people who report having “non-celiac wheat sensitivity” show evidence of systemic immune activation and impaired intestinal permeability. In short, NCWS is characterized by leaky gut, increased translocation of gut contents—including microbial toxins—into circulation, and moderate immune reactivity to a gluten challenge. It certainly seems quite real. (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

The low-carb flu is real and it’s terrible. While it doesn’t kill as many as the Spanish flu of 1918 did or inspire the amount of panic seen during the 2009 swine flu epidemic, low-carb flu has dissuaded millions of people from pursuing and sticking to a healthy diet. You can laugh now that you’re fat-adapted and humming along on stored body fat, but you’ve forgotten just how terrible the transition from sugar-burning to fat-burning can be. Do any of the following symptoms sound familiar? (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Host Elle Russ chats with Sher Smith, a Paleo Thyroid Solution Success Story from Elle’s upcoming release! By the age of 26, Sher Smith had resolved a decade long eating disorder but was struggling mightily with a laundry list of physical, mental, and emotional symptoms. With the help of Mark Sisson’s Primal Blueprint (goodbye gluten, hello fat!), life got a little bit better. But after being told that her thyroid wasn’t “the problem” and that she had to “just workout more” to lose weight, she started to believe her body was just broken and this was the unhealthy hand she had been dealt. Sher met Elle at one of Mark’s amazing PrimalCon’s in 2014 and since then, her life has completely changed. Over the last two years working with Elle and a doctor in Chicago, Sher has optimized her thyroid health. As a result, she has lost almost 60 pounds, resolved all her thyroid and adrenal symptoms, maintained a primal workout routine, and had a vibrant and healthy primal pregnancy and natural childbirth. As an unintend

Every day we’re barraged by “good ideas”—all the things we should be doing with our lives and could start doing today if we really cared enough. Too much advice can overwhelm us, and, more importantly, it can inflate the power of “should.” It can cement an insidious (and, in my experience, ineffective) framework in our minds. We risk framing every choice—from work to pleasure—as an obligation. Doing so burdens life with a constant sense of onus, constraint and deprivation—not exactly the stuff of grand motivation. In my experience, we aren’t in for much fun or long-term success with that brand of approach. Luckily, there’s a better way to talk to ourselves. (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Coffee is serious business. We Americans drink about 400 million cups of it per day and spend several billion dollars on it each year. It’s the most popular drug on earth, and certainly the most socially acceptable. In many ways, coffee’s the closest thing we’ve got to a universal, daily ritual, as just about every morning, billions of people across the planet prostrate themselves before the holy, energy-giving legume. It also hails from the same place the earliest members of our species do: East Africa (Ethiopia, to be exact). That the most industrious animal ever to walk the planet and the psychoactive legume that fuels said industry both hail from the same place on earth is pure poetry. Coffee’s also delicious. I’d say you’d have to pry my coffee from my cold, dead fingers, only the ensuing struggle would slosh it all onto the floor, and that would be such a waste. Yet it’s also considered to be a vice, one of those substances that “everyone knows” is bad for you. Is it?   (This Mark's Daily Apple arti

Every day we’re barraged by “good ideas”—all the things we should be doing with our lives and could start doing today if we really cared enough. Too much advice can overwhelm us, and, more importantly, it can inflate the power of “should.” It can cement an insidious (and, in my experience, ineffective) framework in our minds. We risk framing every choice—from work to pleasure—as an obligation. Doing so burdens life with a constant sense of onus, constraint and deprivation—not exactly the stuff of grand motivation. In my experience, we aren’t in for much fun or long-term success with that brand of approach. Luckily, there’s a better way to talk to ourselves. (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Host Elle Russ chats with Cassie Parks, a Lifestyle Design Strategist who loves the ocean, dancing for no reason, and celebrating with champagne. What she loves most of all is living a life a she loves. Cassie is a best-selling author, international speaker and coach whose passion is leading others to live the life they have been dreaming about. Her latest book, Manifest $10,000 is available on amazon.com. Cassie is the creator of the Manifest $10k course which has helped thousands of people manifest more money into their lives. You can join the course at manifest10k.com and learn more about working with Cassie at liveyourchampagnelife.com.

There’s a Flaubert quote I stumbled on once: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” I’ve always been more of a science man than an artist of course (and I don’t know that carbohydrate curves or sprint intervals could ever be creatively “violent” anyway). Nonetheless, something about the underlying concept always stayed with me. It begs a fundamental, even pivotal question: where do you want the freedom to be bold and impulsive (or at least spontaneous) in your life, and where do you want the security of being fixed and (relatively speaking) unyielding? (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

The difficult thing about headaches is figuring out why they’re occurring. Pain in other areas is different. You can look at your hand if it’s hurting and figure out why. You can see the cut on your knee and know what’s going on. But you are your head, and the headache is inside. Your consciousness sits behind your eyes observing reality and directing your role in it. It’s all a big mystery. Or so it feels. (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Matt is a social entrepreneur in the fields of personalized health and future medicine. A heart- centered visionary, Matt is focused on changing the health trajectory of the human race. He orchestrates a global collaborative vision to revolutionize the concept of health as we know it and facilitate personalized, predictive and preventive health change around the world. Matt holds a masters in applied human sciences, is a lecturer and clinical educator at several universities in Australia, and has been recognized for his passion and excellence in educating doctors, health professionals and fitness experts globally over the past 10 years. In 2013, Matt founded the Ultimate Human Foundation, a non-profit with a mission to transform world health and assist in eliminating chronic pain and disease from the planet. Matt has founded 7 businesses in health and medicine over the past 10 years, launching ph360.me, the world’s first smart health app based on personalized epigenetics and gene expression and most recently

Although mainstream sources still mistake “the brain needs glucose” for “the brain can only run on glucose,” regular MDA readers know the truth: given sufficient adaptation, the brain can derive up to 75% of its fuel from ketone bodies, which the liver constructs using fatty acids. If we could only use glucose, we wouldn’t make it longer than a few days without food. If our brains couldn’t utilize fat-derived ketones, we’d drop dead as soon as our liver had exhausted its capacity to churn out glucose. We’d waste away, our lean tissue dissolving into amino acids for hepatic conversion into glucose to feed our rapacious brains. You’d end up a skeletal wraith with little else but your brain and a hypertrophied liver remaining until, eventually, the latter cannibalized itself in a last ditch search for glucose precursors for the tyrant upstairs. It would get ugly. That’s adaptation. But is there an actual cognitive advantage to running on ketones? (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and i

How can you leverage doubt in pursuing a healthy life? Let me throw out a few takeaways and examples. (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)

Bloating is mostly subjective. You can “feel” bloated without experiencing actual stomach bulging. Other times, it adds actual inches to your waistline. Why does it happen? Why do our stomachs distend and our sphincters proclaim their gaseous intentions to the world? What causes this nebulous condition and how can we avoid and fix it? (This Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Leaman)