The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson,

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

The A to Z Guide to Leading a Primal Lifestyle.

Go to Marksdailyapple.com and print this out. Bookmark it.

Send it to friends who don't quite get the primal thing. Consider this a valuable resource for all things primal.

It's a nice alphabetical encapsulation of what it means to lead a primal lifestyle. It's not everything,

of course. You can always dig deeper into the details, but this summary gives a high-level look

at just about everything. Without further ado, I present the A to Z guide to leading a primal

lifestyle. A. Avoid chronic cardio. I spent about

half my life running and later with triathlons swimming and cycling myself into the ground.

I thought the more miles I could log the healthier I'd be. That's the mindset many people have,

and it's absolutely wrong. Running a 10-miler is different than running a 10-miler every day.

We have the capacity to go long distances and even outlast wild animals upon which we're praying.

We don't have the capacity to do that every single day

without consequences to our hell. Run long distances if you love it. Compete if you love competing.

But know the cost it incurs. B. Barefoot is best. We're born barefoot. Kids who are allowed to go barefoot or wear non-constrictive

shoes grow up with excellent foot health because their feet grow naturally. They don't need arch support

because they develop their own built-in arches. They have lower rates of flat-footedness,

and perhaps most importantly, being barefoot allows a person to utilize the vast array of nerves, muscles, and connective tissue to experience the world underneath them, a rich world of which shoe wearers are mostly ignorant.

C. Chronic stress is to be avoided. Before the advent of traffic jams, nagging bosses

presiding over soul-sucking jobs, credit card debt, and other ceaseless sources of unpleasantness,

most sources of stress were punctuated and acute. That's the environment in which our physiologies, nervous

...