T H E D E F I N I T I V E G U I D E T O T R O U B L E S H O O T I N G W E I G H T L O S S

Weight loss is easy, until it’s not. Those first few weeks, months, and even years following a Primal eating plan can feel effortless. The weight just flies off. And you don’t really need to do anything special be-sides eat fewer carbs, grains, and sugar and more (and better) fat and protein. But you’ve heard all that. You’ve done all that and gotten pretty far. Just not far enough, which is why you’re reading this eBook. You’re here because you’re facing what every person who’s gone up against their suboptimal eating history has eventually met: a weight loss plateau. These are those last few, or few dozen, pounds that simply will not budge, even though you might be eating a great diet and seemingly doing everything you thought you were supposed to be doing. So now you want answers. You want solutions. At the very least, you want to know what went wrong so that you can figure out how to fix it. There are many reasons why someone stops losing weight. The human body is a bio-logical organism of immense complexity, after all. It’s an amazing, beautiful symphony of hormones and muscle fibers and neurotransmitters and neurons, but a lot can go wrong—especially given the toxic environment in which many of us live. So, assuming you’ve enjoyed previous weight loss following the Primal Blueprint, and you’ve read both The Primal Blueprint (if not, go here) and Primal Blueprint Fitness (if not, become a Mark’s Daily Apple subscriber here and gain instant access to this free 92-page eBook), what are some common—and not so common but no less relevant to the people they affect—stumbling blocks responsible for weight loss stalls? When you read the next section, take each stumbling block as its own entity. Don’t read all of them, freak out, and think you need to address each and every one. That’s impos-sible because many of them are contradictory. If not eating breakfast is stalling weight loss, ignore the suggestion to skip breakfast. Choose the ones that apply to you (don’t worry if you’re confused about this step; in a later section, I’ll include some of the most common weight loss stall archetypes and my recommended prescriptions).

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Weight Loss Stalls DissectedYou eat too much. There’s not much more to say here. Eating more food than you actually need will stall weight loss, if not outright reverse it. Low carb isn’t magic. It reins in wild hunger and tames insulin, but calories do still matter—especially once you approach your ideal weight. In fact, those last few pounds often don’t respond to the same weight loss trig-gers that worked so well to get you to this point. Eating nut butter by the spoonful and hunks of cheese without regard for caloric content may have gotten you this far, but you’ve got to tighten things up if you’ve started to plateau. And that’s the real test, isn’t it? Eating Primally tends to cause spontaneous calorie reduction, but if the weight isn’t coming off, something’s up—and it might be the amount of food you’re eating.You eat too little. The worst way for most people to lose the last few bits of body fat is to lower calories drastically and keep them that low for days, weeks, months on end. This is a great way to destroy your will to live and train. This is a great way to lower levels of leptin and thyroid hormone, the primary arbiters of energy expenditure and metabolic rate. This is a great way to see your body fat losses slow to a trickle. You may not get any fatter this way, but you’re not going to get any leaner either. You don’t sleep enough. Lack of sleep is big killer. It causes insulin resistance, which means insulin sticks around in the blood and prevents fat burning for longer periods of time for a given carb load. It increases cortisol, and when cortisol levels are chronically elevated fat is hard to burn. And if we’re not sleeping, we’re not secreting an optimal level of growth hor-mone, which figures prominently in fat burning. Sleep deprivation also makes junk food look and taste better, prompting its (over)consumption. And finally, if we’re not getting enough sleep, we’re not going to have enough energy or willpower to sustain healthy habits that support optimal weight, like exercising, making smart choices, or cooking.

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You consume too much artificial light at night and not enough natural light during the day.Circadian rhythm affects more than just sleep. You could be getting eight hours a night, but if you’re stuck indoors during the day and blast the electronics at night, your body will think it’s day at night and night at day. A big cause of disordered appetite is circadian desynchrony. Numerous scientific studies have substantiated the link between unnatural light cycles and obesity and metabolic syndrome. Research shows that too much light at night (from room lighting, electronic screens, you name it) can increase hunger and may actually regulate fat mass directly, increasing body fat in rodents (and perhaps other mammals) without them eating any more food or moving any less. You’re not sprinting. Whenever someone complains about a weight loss stall, the first thing I ask is “Are you sprinting?” Sprinting turns muscle into fuel sponges that sop up any carbs you eat and store them as glycogen instead of fat. Sprinting up-regulates fat metabolism. It boosts growth hor-mone. Fat burning stays elevated for hours after a good sprint session. Weight loss isn’t just about eliminating any old kind of body mass. It’s about losing body fat while pre-serving or even gaining muscle and bone. Sprinting appears to be excellent at eliminat-ing body fat without the negative impact on muscle mass commonly seen with exces-sive endurance training. A recent study found that a single sprint session can increase post-exercise fat oxidation (burning) by 75%, while another found that sprinting im-proves body composition by reducing body fat.And you don’t have to sprint all out on a flat track to get the benefits. You can sprint anywhere: in a pool, up a hill, on a bike, on a rower. The possibilities are nearly end-less, as long as you’re willing to move (about) as quickly as you can for a short burst of time. You eat too frequently. For decades, we’ve been told to “keep snacks handy.” We’ve been told to eat tiny meals

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throughout the day, never going more than a couple hours without food. This keeps our metabolism “revved up,” we’re told, and it’s crucial for healthy weight loss. Nonsense. The actual studies show that people who snack the most eat the most overall calories. A 2014 analysis published in the medical journal Physiology & Behavior suggests that the snack foods many consumers eat offer very little nutrition, particularly among children and overweight snackers. And while to some degree these findings are con-founded by the fact that many people snack on calorie-dense junk food, constant snack-ing on anything never gives your body the chance to burn body fat for energy. If food is constantly streaming in, why start breaking down energy stores? Don’t eat because “you’re supposed to” eat. Eat when truly hungry, not because “a piece of candy sounds really good right now.” You eat too infrequently. Another contradiction. What’s going on here, Sisson? Is it too frequently or too infre-quently?While I’ve often lambasted the canard of stoking one’s metabolic fire with frequent meals, there’s some truth to it. Skipping meals works for some people, while in others it depresses metabolism, triggers low blood sugar episodes and insatiable hunger, and stalls weight loss. It can be either and both. Biology isn’t black and white. Your eating schedule is erratic. Whatever eating schedule you want to follow, whether it’s skipping breakfast, eating six meals a day, eating three, or skipping dinner, stick to it. In one study, healthy lean adults experienced a lower thermic effect of food—the extra burst of energy required to process and digest the food we eat—when they ate accord-ing to a disordered, erratic schedule. The same effect happened in overweight women trying to lose weight. Reduced thermic effect of food means lower energy expenditure. The body likes schedules. Those schedules can change, but it’s best to do so gradually

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to allow the body to adapt. You engage in mindless eating. If you asked most people what made them overweight in the first place, it was that sneaky, tricky combination of eating and, well, doing everything else but focusing on the food. Mindless eating is eating while watching TV. It’s eating while driving (I once saw a man eat a bowl of cereal on the 405 freeway). It’s eating while cooking (not tast-ing to stay abreast of the dish but full-on eating). It’s popcorn at the movies. It’s beer and wings and more beer during the game. In other words, mindless eating feels like breathing, like something you just do. You take a few chews, rarely enough to qualify as real mastication, and down the hatch it goes, with a follow-up handful close on its heels. You never give your body a chance to realize it’s just taken in energy. Food is sacred stuff, made of plants and animals that died to provide nutrition and sus-tenance to your body. Show it—and the people around you—the respect deserved. Practice mindful eating. Eat food with others, sit down to dinner, lunch, and breakfast, and take the time to appreciate the food you’re eating. Pause with each bite to note the flavors, textures, and satisfaction derived. Just because you’re scarfing down grass-fed beef, pastured eggs, and leafy greens doesn’t mean you can get away with mindless con-sumption.Your macronutrient ratios and training regimen are misaligned. For most people who stay reasonably active, doing lots of low-level movement as well as some lifting, a low-carb Primal way of eating is generally the most effective way to lose body fat. It tastes good, it’s easy to stick to, and, most importantly, it works. But some people like to push the envelope. They like waking up early and going for a run, then coming home at night and hitting the weights. They’re avid CrossFitters. They like seeing how far their bodies can go. They’re concerned with performance, above all else, and they want to maximize every last drop of physicality their bodies can muster. In that case, more dietary carbs are probably called for—especially if you’re trying to lose weight at the same time. Otherwise, your body will increase cortisol to spur gluco-neogenesis, the creation of glucose from protein. This constant elevation of cortisol is terrible for fat loss, and it can even precipitate the addition of abdominal fat, that most

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unsightly and dangerous kind. Certain activities just require glycogen, and your body is going to get it if it needs it. It’s better to just eat the carbs and avoid the cortisol bur-den. I do plenty of activities that use up glycogen, but I’m not doing them day in, day out, so I don’t need to eat a lot of carbs. There are others, though, who rarely train hard enough to warrant carb loading. Yet carbs they load because they read somewhere that starches can be safe. They can, but if you want to start pounding potatoes and white rice and eating berries by the bushel without stalling on your weight loss, you have to earn them in the gym (or track, or beach, or backyard gym, or wherever else you train). If you are truly active, if you’re doing WODs every day and playing in a basketball league on the weekends and doing jiu-jitsu twice a week, you’ll need to replenish those glycogen stores more often or else risk that chronically stressed state that stops weight loss. If you aren’t, you don’t need as many carbs, and they could be holding you back from achieving weight loss. You’re not eating enough vegetables. People in modern societies have a funny tendency to be overweight but malnourished, obese but starved of nutrients. That’s because we eat nutrient-poor food that’s high in calories (and flavor), carbs, and unhealthy fats. Since much of human hunger is driven by micronutrient requirements, we get hungry when we’re deficient in minerals—an unfortunately common physiological state in many countries. And because our image of food is so skewed—the classic example of kindergarteners being unable to identify a tomato comes to mind—the foods we crave when a defi-ciency is present are often unhealthy. So a sodium craving manifests as a potato chip craving, a magnesium deficiency becomes a chocolate craving, and a protein craving becomes a Big Mac craving. Veggies are among the most nutrient-dense and calorie-sparse foods around. You can eat all the vegetables you pretty much want without adding a lot of calories to your daily totals. And those vegetables provide the minerals your cravings are trying to moti-vate you to obtain, the antioxidants your body needs to counter low level oxidative

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stress, and the phytonutrients that protect against aging and disease and promote a lean, toned figure.You’re adding lean mass.I see this time and time again. The Primal Blueprint spurs fat loss while promoting mus-cle gain and better bone density, and the scale stays the same. People freak out because they aren’t losing weight, but isn’t less fat and more muscle exactly what we want? If you’re feeling good but failing to see any improvements register on the scale’s measure-ments, it’s most likely extra muscle and stronger bone from resistance training. You wouldn’t know that just from the bathroom scale. If you absolutely need objective re-cords of your progress, get a body fat percentage test (although these might not even tell the whole story) or try measuring your waist alongside the scale weight. And track your progress; the trends tell the story.This is why I don’t like relying solely on the scale: it can’t give an accurate picture of what kind of weight you’re losing or gaining. It simply measures the amount of force gravity exerts on you—your mass. But what kind of mass are we talking about here? You’re not eating enough protein. Of all the macronutrients, protein is the most satiating, and high-protein diets (which are usually also low-carb) consistently result in the greatest inadvertent reduction in calories. You don’t consciously stop eating. You’re not fighting your desire for food. You simply don’t want it. That’s the perfect antidote to insatiable hunger. Make a point of adding an extra 20 grams of protein each meal. A few ounces of steak here, a chicken leg there, a piece of salmon, a few eggs…you’ll be fuller, faster, and you’ll eat less of the other stuff as a result. You’re eating too much fat. A cornerstone of the Primal eating plan is becoming an efficient fat burner and shift-ing away from total reliance on exogenous sugar for energy. This helps you access stored body fat in between meals and helps you avoid the sugar crashes that commonly

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spur mindless snacking. And one important step along the path to reconfiguring your fat-burning machinery is higher fat consumption. It improves satiation and, by reduc-ing carbs, you end up eating fewer calories in the process. But too much fat is still too much fat, and excess fat—the fat we eat that isn’t burned or metabolized into ketones (the end-product of fat burning)—becomes body fat. Some people eat more fat and lose more weight. Others eat more fat and gain more fat. Calories aren’t all equal, but they all contribute to your energy requirements and stores. If what previously worked no longer does, you might try reducing your fat intake while keeping protein and carbs (which are already fairly low, remember) relatively constant. Any fat requirements, beyond the long-chain polyunsaturated fats that we can’t manu-facture ourselves, will be met by liberation of adipose tissue (body fat). And wouldn’t you know: liberation of adipose tissue tends to cause weight loss! You’re not eating enough carbs. Wait, wait, wait: eating more carbs can help beat stubborn weight loss plateaus? I thought the premise of the Primal Blueprint was that reducing our reliance on carbs improves our ability to access and burn stored body fat for energy. If that’s true, how do we reconcile that statement?It all comes down to leptin. Leptin is the hormone secreted by adipose tissue as an indi-cator of energy status. Lots of leptin means lots of stored body fat—plenty of available energy—and this lowers the appetite and increases energy expenditure. Low leptin lev-els increase appetite and lower energy expenditure, both of which are obviously unde-sirable physiological states for people trying to get over the fat loss hump. Low body fat levels aren’t the only regulator of leptin, however; extended diet in general, but espe-cially extended very low-carb dieting tends to depress leptin levels. You’re a woman.Before you pillory me, allow me to explain: women and men respond differently to macronutrients, exercise, and calorie restriction.

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Women tend to not respond as well to fasting as men do. Thus, you might need to eat more frequently, or at least not skip as many meals. Women tend to burn more fat and fewer carbohydrates during exercise. This means that for a given intensity of exercise, you burn more fat and less glycogen than a man does. So, while a guy might get away with large carb loads because he’s filling up de-pleted glycogen burned during exercise, you might not need as many carbs because you burned more fat than glycogen during the same workout. Women tend to store more fat in the lower body, and this may actually be a marker of good health and fertility. Lower body fat, particularly in the hips and butt, is repository of long-chain omega-3s, which are diverted toward building healthier and smarter ba-bies in the womb. That’s why women tend to have “stubborn” fat down there: they’re saving it for babies. So even if you’re not pregnant and never plan on becoming preg-nant, the fact that you’re storing fat in your hips and butt is a sign of good health, not a cause to worry and feel like a failure. You sit too much. You can’t counter a sedentary life with a couple bouts of exercise each week. That cer-tainly helps, but it can’t undo all the sitting—in the office, in the car, on the couch—most people do on a daily basis. Humans are mobile walking creatures, and reneging on that ages-old tradition means lower energy expenditure, poor metabolic response to food, and weight gain.You need to start counting calories. I designed the Primal eating plan around the concept of “effortless” weight loss be-cause the idea that weight loss requires counting every calorie that enters (and leaves) your body just never made sense to me. I mean, I got that some people need those ob-jective road markers to ensure they’re on the right path toward fat loss, but everyone? No way. But there’s a point where weight loss stops being effortless and many people, particu-larly those trying to reach single digit body fat percentages and not getting anywhere, simply must track calories. That’s okay, and it’s not a sign that you’ve failed.

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You’re overdoing it with healthy foods. Lots of foods that get the Primal stamp of approval are also calorie-dense, delicious, and dangerously easy to overeat. I’m talking about your 85% dark chocolates, high in phytochemicals and minerals and healthy fats, but half a bar later and you’re 350 calo-ries deep without even realizing it. Or your nuts, which are consistently associated with improved health outcomes but also taste really good with salt and disappear into your gullet by the handful. Or how about honey, the antioxidant-rich sweetener that even diabetics can usually eat without incurring the adverse effects seen with sugar consump-tion? It’s also one of the most calorie-dense foods on the planet, and it’s easy to drizzle a few tablespoons on your bowl of Greek yogurt in a second. Foods add up. Too much healthy, nutrient-dense food is still too much food, and it can and will make you gain weight or stop losing it. Plus, many of these foods are delicious, packed with calories as well as nutrients, and can be overeaten, particularly because they have the reputation as “health foods.” No foods are “free.” You’ve forgotten that Primal isn’t just a diet. You get your produce exclusively from farmers markets. You have two chest freezers in the garage full of pastured boar and grass-fed auroch. Any dairy you consume must have been in an udder no more than 12 hours prior. You can glance at a plate of food and rattle off its contribution to the RDI for every micronutrient recognized by the USDA. Your diet is solid. You eat more Primally than I do, and yet the weight remains. What gives?Primal isn’t just a diet, folks. It’s a set of lifestyle guidelines, each of which is arguably as important as the stuff you put in your mouth. Are you spending time out in nature? Are you moving frequently at a slow pace, lifting heavy things, and sprinting once in awhile? Are you spending time with friends and family and cultivating your tribe? How often do you play? The small stuff isn’t small stuff.

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You need to relax. Primal eating isn’t a religion. It’s not a cult. It’s just a helpful, easy-to-follow guideline for making dietary choices. While adhering to a framework that has proven its worth in days past is understandable and usually works, sometimes you just need to let your hair down and, provided you’re not a full-blown celiac, stop freaking out about the gluten in your soy sauce. Just dip the hamachi, even if the sushi joint has run out of GF tamari. You need to eat breakfast. This doesn’t apply to everyone. Some people thrive when skipping breakfast; I’m one of them. Others need that early morning meal. There is some evidence, albeit mostly anecdotal and epidemiological, that eating breakfast on a regular basis can help with leaning out. Eating breakfast can improve satiety and reduce caloric intake the rest of the day, particularly if the meal is high in protein. Many women benefit from breakfast, or at least not waiting so long to eat the first meal of the day. Breakfast also seems to es-tablish a healthy, natural circadian rhythm, which can help regulate appetite and sleep. You need to move more. I hate the “eat less, move more” advice as much as anything. While technically true, it’s overly simplistic and tries to force something that should come naturally—eating less food and being more physically active in your day-to-day life. Time and time again, the forced approach fails. People move more and then eat more because they get really hun-gry. Or people tank their calorie intake so much that they can’t muster the will or strength to exercise. The fact remains, however, that maintaining a high level of constant daily activity seems to be the recipe for overcoming stubborn weight loss. Think about how many people vacation in Europe, eat way more food (and carbs) than they would normally eat, and then come back home at a lower weight than when they left. They might say it’s the quality of food over there, the red wine they drink, the way they make their bread and grind their grains, the lack of GMOs, or maybe even the midday naps. And it might be some or all of those things. But I think the primary reason people come back to the States leaner is the sheer power of moving more. When you’re vacationing

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in a new city, you walk a lot more. You explore. You’re constantly moving. You eat a big lunch and then go sightseeing for several hours. You eat dinner and have dessert, then stroll along the river with an espresso and enjoy the nighttime lights. You can’t rely on vacation, though, so you’ll need to modify your habits at home. Go for a walk or two each day. Garden and putter around the house. Do housework. Hike. Play with your kids. Use a standing or walking workstation. It’s the integration of low-level physical activity into your everyday (that’s every single day) life that pays the most dividends and can slowly but sustainably spur fat loss. What Archetype Are You?Identifying the factors that cause weight loss plateaus is a great start, but you also have to apply them to your life. Let’s explore some of the most common weight loss plateau archetypes and the factors that apply most directly to them. 1. You’re a CrossFitter pounding out WODs like a champ, but you aren’t losing weight.Eat more carbs: CrossFit (and any suitably high-intensity, high-volume athletic en-deavor) burns through a ton of glycogen. The best, easiest way to replenish glycogen is to eat more carbs. You can stay low carb and get your glycogen through protein, but it’s not easy, often doesn’t work, and usually increases cortisol, which stalls weight loss when chronically elevated. Try titrating your carb intake up 20 grams at a time, prefera-bly taken post workout, until you arrive at a dose that allows muscle recovery and glyco-gen replenishment, doesn’t skyrocket cortisol, and enables resumption of weight loss. Get more sleep: It’s probable you aren’t recovering enough, and sleep is when our muscles grow and energy replenishes. Training hard increases sleep requirements. Maybe it’s time to move from the 5 am class to the 6 pm one. Train less: You don’t really need to train hard five days a week, and as your results are showing, you probably can’t.

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Track your body fat: You might simply be gaining enough muscle to offset the fat you’re losing, and the result is a weight plateau. To figure out, track your body fat. Tak-ing skin fold measurements using calipers and measuring your waist circumference us-ing tape (or belt notches) are the simplest methods. Hydrostatic weighing and DEXAS-can are more involved and costly methods. What matters is the trend, whatever method you use.2. You’re the perfect picture of low-carb eating, yet the weight has stopped coming off.Moderately increase carbs: Ad libitum low-carb Primal is a great way to lose lots of weight fast, especially if you have a lot to lose. Low-carb eating curbs hunger, thus prompting inadvertent calorie reduction, and up-regulates fat-burning machinery and stops your reliance on sugar burning (and the concomitant constant sugar infusions), thus improving your ability to access stored body fat for energy. But to get those last few pounds off, some people find they need to reintroduce more carbs back into their diets to kickstart lagging leptin levels and replenish glycogen lost during training. This could be an overall daily increase of 50-100 grams from starchy vegetables and fruit. Watch the “pleasure foods”: Slow down on the mac nuts. Eat a square of 85% dark chocolate, not the entire bar. Save the coconut butter for special occasions rather than weekday afternoons. Try a carb refeed: If amping up daily carb intake doesn’t work for you, do a twice-weekly carb refeed of 150-200 grams. Both scenarios will boost your leptin levels, which sometimes get too low on extended very low carbing. Since low leptin means lower energy expenditure and increased appetite, a moderate or acute and intermittent increase in carbs can be the stimulus your body needs to kickstart fat burning. Eat less fat: As I mentioned earlier, excessive fat intake can hamper fat loss. If it’s coming from the diet in large amounts, why turn to the adipose tissue? Reduce your fat intake to stimulate weight loss. Eat more protein: The knowledge that fat isn’t the enemy, even confers health bene-fits, and helps speed rapid early weight loss leads to some people forgetting to eat their

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protein. Don’t; protein is highly satiating and helps you lose body fat while retaining lean mass. Aim for 1.6 grams of protein for each kilogram of bodyweight (or 0.7 g/lb.). Try counting calories: This might be the time to start counting calories if ad libi-tum low carb is no longer working. Use calorie-tracking tools like DailyBurn, FitDay, myfitnesspal, and My Plate to make calorie counting easier (and more accurate). Stop micromanaging your diet: Obviously, being “perfect” isn’t working for you, so take a big deep breath and relax. Maybe throw in a cheat day. Just make sure the foods you choose to cheat with are really worth it. Eat your vegetables: Fresh, organic produce provides micronutrients vital for proper metabolic function. Don’t skimp on your leafy greens. 3. You’ve got stubborn belly fat that just isn’t disappearing (and it might even be growing).Try sprinting: Sprinting is a potent, efficient up-regulator of fat oxidation. When you really, truly sprint all out, fat burning is elevated for hours afterward. Sprints are also a reliable way to increase growth hormone release, another fat-burner. And finally, sprinting depletes glycogen like little else, opening up space for dietary carbs without the suppression of fat burning.Try getting more sleep: Poor sleep in general increases our desire for junk food (and the resultant hedonic hit of bliss we get upon consumption of those foods), but epi-demiological evidence also finds a correlation between inadequate sleep and belly fat in particular among those 40 years or younger. Although everyone’s sleep needs (and opti-mal bedtimes) are different, shooting for a solid 7-9 hours of sleep per night is ideal. Try fasting: Once a week, go 16-24 hours without food. Alternately, you could skip breakfast or dinner each day and follow a shortened eating window. Try cyclical low carb: Low carb on rest days, higher carb (and lower fat) on training days, eaten right around your workouts.

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Focus on stress reduction: Stress, and the resultant cortisol cascade, is a big pro-moter of belly fat. Whether it’s walks in the woods, meditation, anti-stress herbs and supplements…just find something that helps you reduce or mitigate stress.4. You can’t exercise because of injuries, bed rest, lack of free time, or whatever else.Eat more protein: This will keep your hunger from getting out of control, plus it helps prevent lean mass loss (which is a form of weight loss we don’t want). Eat generous servings of vegetables at every meal: Since you won’t be eating as many calories as your active self once did, you need to optimize your nutrient-to-calories ratio. Vegetables, particularly leafy greens, are extremely calorie sparse and nu-trient dense. Spinach even has appetite suppressant effects, if hunger is an issue. Move: Make excuses to move. Walk the stairs. Park far away. Heck, even fidget. Non-essential movement is essential when you’re not exercising. Plenty of people maintain a healthy body composition without outright exercise, but they aren’t completely seden-tary. They still move. 5. You’re not sleeping well.Keep your training load light: Chronic sleep deprivation is a major stressor that increases cortisol and stalls weight loss in its own right. Introducing another major stres-sor—intense, protracted, high-frequency exercise—will only compound the damage and make losing body fat even harder. Stick to walking, low-volume strength training, and low-intensity movement, until you can get your sleep patterns under control. Get more light during the day and less (or none) at night: Your circadian rhythm is all out of whack, and this is probably perturbing your sleep quality and dura-tion. Consider a weeklong camping trip without any artificial light after dark to reset your clock and get back on track, or take early morning walks upon waking for some morning light therapy. 6. You’re always hungry.

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Eat more protein: Protein is the most satiating macronutrient, and diets high in pro-tein consistently produce the least hunger and the greatest weight loss gains.Eat breakfast and make it higher in protein and fat: A lot of people do very well eating according to a truncated eating window that eliminates breakfast, but some don’t. A number of observational studies find that people in the general (read: not Pri-mal) population who skip breakfast tend to be hungrier and consume more overall calo-ries throughout the day, while habitual breakfast eaters are more satiated and eat fewer calories. Breakfasts higher in protein and fat seem to promote greater all-day satiety than do higher carb breakfasts. Make sure you’re sleeping enough: Lack of sleep increases hunger, especially for unhealthy junk foods. And when we give in to the cravings (as most people do) and eat junk foods, we crave them even more when we haven’t slept.Get more natural light early in the day and less artificial light after dark: Remember that a major cause of appetite dysregulation is circadian desynchrony. So read a print book in bed rather than an eBook on your iPad. Light candles, not LEDs. Take your lunches outside when possible. Greet the morning light with open eyes. Eat larger meals less frequently: Snacking doesn’t really fill most people up. It just makes us eat even more food. Eat bigger meals, solid ones that actually sate your hunger, so that you can go without eating for more than four hours at a time (and dip into adipose tissue). 7. You’re a new parent.Invent a time machine and travel back to your pre-child days: I’m kidding, but part of being a new parent are the unavoidable lack of sleep, which disturbs your metabolism and appetite, and of free time, which prevents you from engaging in healthy activities like cooking nutritious food and exercising regularly. You have to ac-cept this crazy time in your life and know that it will pass. Stressing out about your im-mutable circumstances will only make the problem worse.

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Sprint more: Sprinting is the best bang for your buck exercise I know, and it just so happens to be a great fat burner. Take a day or two out of the week to get in a good sprint session. It doesn’t take much time to start feeling and seeing the amazing bene-fits. Eat actual meals: Mindless eating is easy to slip into when you’re short on sleep and there’s an infant vying for your attention. You just cram into your mouth what you can when you can. But if you can eat real meals with your spouse/partner, your body might actually realize it’s eating and you might actually get full for once. Consider it a brief respite from the ceaseless grind of new parenthood. 8. You’re a woman. Reign in stress: Women are more likely than men to turn to food in stressful situa-tions, and this kind of stress eating is linked to obesity in women but not in men. That’s a roundabout way of saying women may be more susceptible to the inhibitory effects of stress on fat loss. Try a carb refeed: Women often do better on slightly higher carb intakes than men, and a refeed is an easy (and fun) way to reintroduce more carbs. Once or twice a week, eat 150-200 additional grams of carbs. Stop skipping meals; don’t fast: All else being equal, women respond more poorly to intermittent fasting than men do. It can work for some, but if you’re trying to lose weight and it’s not working, eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Don’t eat too few calories: Avoid precipitous and sustained drops in calorie intake (500-1000 calorie deficits) and embrace more gradual reductions. If you decide to dras-tically reduce calories, incorporate the occasional high-calorie (or “cheat”) day to keep your metabolism healthy and vibrant. You want to hit that sweet spot, where you’re eat-ing enough food to provide the energy and micronutrients you need to support a strong metabolism and regular physical activity but not so much that you start gaining.

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Putting It All Together You’ve read the previous sections, probably nodding along to some of the content. The next step—the most important step—is entirely up to you. It’s time to put it into practice. It’s time to self-experiment. First, state a goal: I want to resume losing weight. That’s why you’re reading this, right?Second, choose an intervention. Either find the archetype that most resembles your pla-teau or pick out the plateau factors that sound like they apply to you. Come up with a hypothesis. Let’s say you most identify with the “Always Hungry” ar-chetype and the intervention you’re trying is to “Eat More Protein.” Your hypothesis might look like this: Increasing dietary protein will curb hunger, inadvertently reduce calorie intake, and reduce bodyweight while preserving lean mass. Choose what to measure: 1. Subjective hunger. 2. Calorie intake (although without a run-in period of normal caloric intake, it’s hard to know if the protein is making a difference). 3. Bodyweight. 4. Body fat percentage. Consider variables to tweak: 1. Protein dosage (25% of calories? 30%?). 2. Protein timing (eating a rib eye with 100 grams of steak in a single sitting or eating smaller amounts throughout the day). 3. Protein type (plant vs. animal vs. powders). 4. To conduct a truly science-based self-experiment, stick to one single interven-

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tion—maybe increasing protein or sprinting twice a week, or incorporating a carb re-feed, but not all at once. That would muddle the results and you’d never really know what helped.On the flip side, you’re not trying to pass peer review. You just want to lose some stub-born weight. And if trying two, three, even five interventions at once gets you closer to that goal than trying just one, then go with the multi-pronged attack. Why wouldn’t you? That’s what real life is: a wildly uncontrolled self-experiment with thousands of interventions and confounding variables and biases and placebos whizzing in and out. All that matters is what works.That said, figuring out what definitely doesn’t and what does seem to work requires log-ging your journey, and there’s no better tool for that than the Primal Blueprint 90-Day Journal. Notepaper works okay, but I really do like the Journal for streamlining and or-ganizing the experiment’s results. If this is something you want to learn from, keeping a well-organized journal is very helpful. So go forth and figure out just why the heck you haven’t lost weight in awhile. Go throw several things at the wall at once, if that helps, or take it one step at a time if you tend toward the more systematic. Just use your judgment and the evidence presented in this eBook to guide you in choosing the proper projectiles. I'd wish you good luck, but I don't think you'll need it because you have science, your willpower, and your strong, efficient body supporting you every step of the way!

For more help losing weight, visit PrimalBlueprint.com There you'll find instructive books, the 21-Day Transformation Program, the Primal Fuel weight loss shake, and other supplements to that will assist you in burning excess body fat.

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