Archives for February 2011

Before I get to the "book deal," a quick word about Facebook. I get a lot of friend requests from readers but I must ignore them all. As my about page states: "Please note that I do not accept Facebook Friend requests from anyone who is not a current or past in-person friend or a family member." I’m not trying to be mean. I can be engaged in comments and I answer emails when I have the time. But Facebook is intended as a personal space for me with my family, physical world friends and a select few virtual world friends I’ve had for years and years. Please understand, and no begging to make an exception, please (as I’ve been subjected to a few times).  Also, there is a Facebook Page for the blog. Onward.

So, yes, I have "book deal;" that is, I’ve made a deal with myself to self-publish my book and work has begun in earnest on all fronts. So, the book is pretty much planned out, cover to cover, and I have made a number of competent & successful contacts in terms of consulting, editing, design, proofreading and distribution into the brick & mortar and online booksellers.

It will be a hardcover, professionally done in all respects. And while I know a lot of published authors (including in the non-paleo world) and have many ways to be introduced to agents in order to seek a conventional deal, I also have an understanding of the economics of publishing and what authors really make for their efforts. Essentially, unless you’re Black Swan lucky, you’re pretty much destined to earn minimum wage. Read up sometime on Tim Ferriss’ marketing efforts for 4-Hr Workweek, on his blog. Essentially, he had to do most of the work, not only to write the book, but market it. My point is, if I’m going to have to market it myself, which I have to do either way, why settle for a couple of bucks per copy on a $25 hardcover?

Plus, I have the wherewithal to finance the up-front costs of production and printing.

Moreover, far from being afraid, I’m elated. It’s a challenge I’m up to and am very confident that I have a far higher chance of big success through self-publishing, since my reward for success will be immeasurably greater. And besides, self-publishing is the wave of the future.

And oh, one other thing: I don’t have to put up with milquetoast editors and a publisher that wants to tone down my invective, dumb down the message, or run in fear of lawsuits. Screw that. When my book comes out, every single word will be just as I want.

So why the sudden surge now, when I’ve been talking about it for a long time? Enlightenment. I recently got a piece of advice from someone in the know (familiar with my blog), that I definitely ought not write another how-to paleo diet, fitness and health book. That that should be only one aspect of it in the larger context of Free the Animal. So, it’s going to be part telling the story and laying the basis for an evolutionary outlook to everything: society, culture, politics, public policy, and yes…religion.

Or, to put it another way: nothing is safe.

This opens a whole new realm, as I have posts on politics, culture and religion going back to 2003 for reference. While this book most definitely will not be a compilation of blog posts, there will be a few dozen included in the book, all tied together with a narrative, a story.

So, here’s the plan:

1. I’m concurrently writing a "Quick Start Guide" (~ 10 pages) on paleo practices primarily for new visitors to this blog. This will be available for free download within a couple of weeks, in exchange for an email address.
2. I’m also concurrently writing a more detailed How-To-Manual (~100 pages) on paleo practices as an eBook download for purchase. This will be available in a couple of months. The paleo section of the hardcopy book will be more story than How-To.
3. I am currently working on the TOC and sub-chapters, with a lede for each chapter.
4. It should then take about a month to go through the 2,800 posts to find the few dozen for inclusion in the book.
5. Then, 2-3 months to rough draft the narrative that ties it altogether.
6. Goal for completion of the initial draft: July 1, 2011
7. From there, I will strive to have it on bookshelves by the holiday season

I will hold myself accountable by giving a progress update at least once per month, so expect the next one by April 1. Please encourage me to meet these milestones, on time. That’s why I’m posting this: accountability.

In the end, I think I will have met two goals. I do want to have a book that gives good detail on how to do paleo. I just didn’t want to write a major work on it, scour for scientific reference, go bug-eyed reading studies, and so forth. I just want a simple, practical, easy to implement guide with my take and style thrown in.

The second goal is to write a book that old-hand Paleos and longtime readers of this blog just might be interested in reading, because it will go far, far beyond paleo, into areas of self-discovery, success, failure, disappointment, and enlightenment.

The title will be, of course, Free the Animal. I should have a half dozen or so subtitles by my next update and perhaps you all can help me decide which hits nerves best.

Onward.

Addendum: It occurred to me that I left out an important detail. The writing style will be decidedly misanthropic. But I suppose you’d have guessed that anyway. The twist is, it’s not misanthropy directed at man qua man, but toward authoritarian aspects in all facets of what’s ironically referred to as "civilization."

A mixed bag of dishonesty and fraud

You’ve seen me poke fun at the monkey enviers before — though monkeys don’t have bananas delivered by the truckload — and this shall be no exception.

So one of the Vegan Menace shitheads (Durianrider of the 30 Bananas a Day crowd) goes and does just what you’d expect any shithead to do: takes a page from the dying, mainstream media playbook and does a hit piece on various well-known low-carb and Paleo diet advocates. It’s 22 minutes of pretty much pure rubbish.

Turns out, surprise surprise, that not everyone out there maintains a body fat percentage in the single digits. Of course, he picks & chooses "carefully" (that is, to support what I call lying by context). For instance, while the subject matter is "paleo," he includes a mixed bag of photos of various authorities in the field of diet and only one of them is actually a paleo advocate, Loren Cordain. The others are various low-carb, WAPF, and Zone advocates. And frankly, while I have always maintained that Cordain is a hero to the movement, his saturated fat phobia is very unpopular amongst most Paleos I know. The underlying dishonest and manipulative device is that he’s "exposing" paleo as something that will "make you fat" because the folks pictured aren’t ripped, instead sporting what could be considered average body composition for healthy men & women (~15-20% and 20-25% BF, respectively) who aren’t concerned with being ripped & shredded.

And while he does mention Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple and Sean Croxton of Underground Wellness, he includes no photo of Sisson and chooses a photo of Sean’s head only, drinking a beer. I found this photo of Sean in about 5 seconds.

Sean Croxton

Here’s Sean’s take on the affair from his blog. An excerpt:

As usual, he cherry-picked his “overweight low-carb/Paleo” pictures and left out guys like Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson, Art Devany, and myself, who can certainly get our Chippendale on if we really wanted to. He even went so far as to leave a comment (posted below) accusing Mark of using HGH and Art of using steroids. This is utterly ridiculous and defamatory, in my opinion. It’s as if all fit meat eaters over 50 are juicing (and not the kind with the fruits and veggies).

And just go to MDA to see many photos of a ripped, washboard abs Mark Sisson. And how about all the various Crossfit websites all over the net, most of which have photos of clients? Where are the photos of those paleo adherents?

So that was the first part. The second part involves criticizing these folks (primarily Sisson) for their lack of "dietary purity," i.e., for incorporating things like coffee, wine, dark chocolate, protein powder, canned sardines, fish oil caps, etc. Well, individually, anyone can take paleo as pure as they’d like and a lot go pretty pure. I commend them on their individual choice, approach and ultimately success in finding what works for them, combined with the level of commitment they’re individually comfortable with. After all, in self-experimenting and seeing the results in themselves — results as are demonstrated continually on my Real Results pages and Sisson’s Success Stories pages — they have become authorities in themselves and on themselves. How it is that some vegan shithead knows what’s best for them?

Now, I happen to be an FOS (friend of Sisson). We’ve spoken on the phone many times about this whole paleo / Primal thingy and so I know first hand what Mark is up to: maximum inclusiveness. He knows very well that in promoting his 80/20 rule (80% compliant, 20% a mixed bag of non-paleo/primal or "cheats") that he casts the widest possible net for those who are simply never going to make it if all they can do is source local grassfed and pastured animal products, local organic vegetables & fruits, exclude all dairy, and drink only water. Hats off to anyone who makes those choices for themselves and it may even be optimal for most to go that way, but I for one think that every percentage point of purity one strives for above 80-90% compliance ushers in increasing levels of diminishing returns.

Face it, if you’re going to operate a paleo blog or consult clients and insist that supermarket meat is "poison," that a trip to Mc Donald’s now and then is going to kill you after it makes you very sick, you are going to have a very small audience. Fine, if that’s what you want, but then please don’t even imply that you are anywhere near as valuable to the general movement as a Mark Sisson. It’s simply not true in any context.

But we shouldn’t expect anything different from the vegan Menace. After all, the dietary part of it is only a front for the underlying ideology which, to sum it up, is essentially the hating of humanity for being human.

Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.

To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. 

— Anthony Bourdain

The final part of this video takes dishonesty and manipulation in the other direction by showing various pictures of various "vegan" athletes with various degrees of impressive body composition. The thing is, I simply don’t believe it. If they’re claiming they got that way on a pure raw vegan diet, they’re lying. In manny photos, the lean mass pictured is simply impossible on a diet consisting primarily of fruit, as this particular sect of the vegan Menace advocates. Whether they’re getting the high protein needed for that level of lean mass from various powders or sneaking meat and other animal products when no one is looking I don’t know, but they’re getting it somehow.

Here’s the deal. It’s pretty hard to take a ripped and strong paleo and say, "yea, but you got that lean mass and strength from sneaking Mc Donald’s, pizza and Hot Pockets." It’s not necessary. Nor would it make any sense to say, "well, obviously, you’re a raw vegan and are lying about it. You can’t be eating lots of meat." But because of the profoundly unnatural way the vegan catechism works, the inverse does not hold true at all. It’s very easy for these ripped guys with substantial lean mass to claim they’re vegan (popularity mongers) and then chow down on meat & whey powder in the privacy of their own homes for even more popularity and guru status, especially for their primary prey: impressionable, irrationally exuberant young women with shriveled brian mass.

…Closet meat eaters. It makes a big difference.

At any rate, here’s the vegan body compositions not shown on the video, to come full circle on the dishonest manipulation and scam of the thing, for the benefit of shriveled brains that just can’t know any better. Click for the full size version.

Vegan Stick Figure People

Many of you might recall where these clips came from when I poked fun at vegan elitists back here.

In the end, this is about dishonesty, manipulation, and downright fraud for the purpose of promoting an anti-human ideology. First you have their bullshit, easily exposed lies about how the human digestive tract is herbivorous, that meat rots in the gut, that we don’t have killing weapons as carnivores do (we have big brains; that’s our killing weapon, dumbshits), that vegan B12 deficiency doesn’t exist and is of no concern, and on and on. And even when they do acknowledge evolution as having some authority in the diet, it is to highlight various primates. Depending on which particular species of primate you’re talking about, divergence into hominoids happened from about 5-30 million years ago.

Paleos, on the other hand, are focussed on what happened once hominoids emerged and what drove that emergence. Most likely, it was the scavenging of carnivore kills. That is, just as we observe chimps killing and eating smaller primates today (and sometimes their own species) and using tools like sticks to dig and rocks to crush, these same crushing methods were probably used to get at the big-bone marrow and high-fat brains inside skulls…and the rest is history. Once these primates were able to access highly dense nutrition, a metabolically costly big gut became less and less necessary while a big brain became increasingly advantageous. So, to balance this out metabolically, according to both Kleiber’s Law and The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, our primate ancestors’ guts shrank over millions of years and their brains grew such that hominoids emerged. Moreover, modern humans have the exact same metabolic rate, pound for pound, as any primate ancestor, but with inverse metabolic costs associated with guts and brains. Only evolution can account for this and only by the increasing access to high density animal nutrition — first from scavenging and eventually, cunning brains that could hunt, trap, and kill prey and then finally, cooking to extract even more nutrition from less food.

Simply stated, no longer did we need to sit about eating fucking bananas all day long. Durianrider in that video above boasts of eating up to 70 bananas a day (30 just isn’t enough, I guess). Now think about that. Assume he sleeps only an average of 6 hours per night, leaving 18. That means that during that time, he has to eat 4 bananas an hour, or one every 15 minutes — for 18 hours.

…Well, I told you he’s a dumbshit. He could get far more nutrition in two 15-30 minute sessions per day on good helpings of meat, fish and vegetables. Hey, go ahead and toss in a banana or two per day and leave the other 68 bananas for the 5-30 million year old evolutionary ancestors.

In the end, this is just pitiful. It’s so unscientific; hell, anti-scientific — to go right along with the anti-humanity. These people or, perhaps more accurately, retro-humans — WAY retro — must be feeling the pinch of the totally sensible and successful paleo movement. Hell, even Dr. Oz gets it mostly right. You’ve come a long way, baby!

Update: Here’s a short video of stick-figure-man, Durianrider himself, getting his monkey on and no, I don’t mean masturbating in public. So, it’s work safe.

Alright, now go get on those Facebook and Twitter buttons at the top and get to ruffling feathers partout!

Bacon Eggs

Doesn’t get much simpler than that (click for the hi-res version). Since there’s no bread I recommend having a spoon on hand if you don’t lick those pastured yolks off the plate, as I do.

That’s very flattering, and a nice post. And yea, I’m well aware that I’m the bad guy for some, or many. I’ve also yet to see a single of my detractors accomplish much of anything in spreading the word. I, on the other hand, had 184,000 visits and 340,000 page views to my blog last month.

So it’s really funny when people tell me I’m a disservice to the paleo / LC community with stats like this, and having started some years ago with visits at about 10,000 visits per month.

So, based on my experience, I’m the one who knows what the eff I’m doing and all the nattering nabobs of negativity haven’t an effing clue, and they all know exactly what they can do about that in terms of self-fornication.

Of course, I rarely ever talk about this because those people are just "pips." All they ever "contribute" are complaints about the way I, Sisson, De Vany or others do things to advance the paleo message in ways we have found and proven to be successful, while the hand-wringing pips do absolutely nothing but bitch & moan; they never did anything, haven’t produced anything ever in this area, and never will amount to a runny shit.

My comment, here, slightly edited. Additional history here and here.

Addendum: I neglected to mention that Steve Cooksey, the author of that post about moi in the first link told his story of his experience with diabetes and the Two ADAs back here.