If you don’t know who Mark Sisson is, he’s the man behind Mark’s Daily Apple and the Primal Blueprint.

The Primal way of living looks back to our ancestors to see how they lived and what they ate and attempts to translate that to our modern lives. Eating primal basically means eating plenty of protein and fats and going easy on the carbs and grains. It’s not Atkins though as the diet involves eating lots of vegetables and some fruit too.

Going Primal also means exercising on a regular basis. Mark suggests working out with weights or doing intense bodyweight workouts 2-3 times per week and low intensity exercises like walking around 5 times per week.

I’ve been looking at adopting the primal way of life for a while now. I’ve been overweight for quite some time, even though I don’t eat much junk food. I eat mostly organic fruit and veggies as well as plenty of pasta, rice, and potatoes. I think it’s those last 3 things which are killing me.

Today I stumbled across an interview Mark Sisson did which talks a little about the Primal movement and how it goes against conventional wisdom. Here are the best bits:

A trendy topic that is very misunderstood, as far as I am concerned, is the mainstream obsession with "calories in, calories out." The government’s lifestyle planners believe that posting calories on fast food menus is going to reduce obesity, and websites everywhere, like Livestrong.com, provide tools for tracking calories for every daily activity, including watching TV and washing the dishes. The positive energy balance hypothesis suggests that the problem is that people eat too much and exercise too little, and therefore, burning more calories than you take in is the key to maintaining a healthy weight and body fat percentage. Trying to live by that credo is, and has been, a recipe for failure for Americans whose health and weight issues are becoming more pronounced. Counting calories is not the answer, but the constant emphasis on this simplistic view keeps people from focusing on what’s really important – the quality of the calories. Gary Taubes, in his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, did a good job of tackling this myth with the use of scientific evidence. What’s your take on this matter, and why does the medical establishment and fitness-nutrition industry continue to peddle this tripe?

It’s unfortunate that we as a society have bought into this notion that it’s a simple equation involving gross calorie differences that can be accounted for with exercise calculators and diet wheels. It’s a reason so many of us continue to get more obese, diabetic, and arthritic. Yes, to a certain extent, in order to lose weight you have to burn off more body fat than you store and some of that has to do with eating too much. But it’s more a factor of eating the wrong things. The answer is found in what I refer to as the "context of calories." Macronutrients are used for more than just energy. Protein is primarily a structural component and secondarily a fuel. Fats can be structural as well as a fuel source. Carbohydrates in excess can raise the storage hormone insulin, predisposing excess calories from any source to be stored as fat. Some people can gain weight (store fat) on a high carb 2,000 calorie per day diet and yet lose weight (burn fat) on a 2,000 calories per day low-carb diet, all other things being equal. Why is that? Every bite you take is a hormonal experience. Depending on what you eat, how much, what time of day, under what prior conditions, a number of different metabolic consequences can ensue. It annoys me that in the face of so much good science to this effect, the medical and fitness establishments stick to the old calories-in vs. calories-out mantra.

Nowadays, there are dozens of articles appearing in the mainstream press on the benefits of high-intensity, short duration interval training for the average person looking to get fit. This is something that many athletes have practiced for years, but most average folks have never been introduced to the concept. They’ve been conditioned to churn away for hours a week on cardio equipment in the gym while the machine displays the number of calories they have "burned." This has turned people toward excessive cardio as opposed to quality cardio. Most folks burn out and get bored, and they eventually become disillusioned with fitness because of the lack of results. Others plateau and they never really gain from all those hours spent exercising. Yet most non-athletes can’t conceive of high-intensity workouts, even though it can drastically shorten their time spent working out. It seems that most people aren’t interested in that method because they’ve become a slave to the slow, lazy technique where the workout really doesn’t seem like work, and accordingly, the results equal the output. How do you convince the average person seeking health and fitness results that interval exercise is a win-win framework, and their old program is not a long-term keeper?

The first thing I do here is point to the science. Numerous studies going back a few decades consistently prove that high-intensity interval training once a week far outweighs traditional aerobic exercise in improving strength, speed, endurance, and other fitness measurements. Even if you discount the evolutionary evidence that we were born to sprint, why would you ignore science that shows you can get so much more benefit from so much less work?

I coined a phrase a few years ago called "chronic cardio" to describe the no-man’s-land where people become slaves to their endurance workout, thinking they’re doing the right thing. They burn up the calories hoping that’s how they’ll lose weight, but in fact most of what they’re burning in these high-heart-rate workouts is glycogen (the stored form of carbohydrate) and not very much fat. Having read the Conventional Wisdom that says that carbohydrates are the preferred cardio fuel, they then go home and load up on more carbs – just so they’ll be able to go back and do it all over again the next day. We know that excess carbs get converted quite easily to stored body fat and that the brain will cause most of us to slightly overeat to make up for the deficit on the treadmill. The end result, and you see it all the time in the gyms, is people grinding it out on the machines year-in and year-out but never really losing body fat. Meanwhile, they’re also depressed at the lack of results, the repetition causes severe wear and tear on joints that otherwise would prefer a wide range of motion, and the metronomic heart beat resulting from the steady pace can have negative consequences over time (ironic since often the reason people often take this up is for "their health"). Old habits are hard to break, which makes it difficult to take an ailing runner or triathlete and convince him or her that s/he can be faster, fitter and healthier if s/he just cuts back on the garbage miles and does a little resistance training.