Eat Bacon, Don't Jog

Book excerpt: This is your brain on Grant Petersen: Every comfortable assumption you have about a subject is turned upside down, and by the time you finish reading you feel challenged, energized, and smarter. In Just Ride—“the bible for bicycle riders” (Dave Eggers, New York Times Book Review)—Petersen debunked the bicycle racing– industrial complex and led readers back to the simple joys of getting on a bike. In Eat Bacon, Don’t Jog, Petersen upends the last 30 years of conventional health wisdom to offer a clear path to weight loss and fitness. In more than 100 short, compelling directives, Eat Bacon, Don’t Jog shows why we should drop the carbs, embrace fat, and hang up our running shoes, with the latest science to back up its claims. Diet and Exercise make up the bulk of the book, with food addressed in essays such as “Carbohydrate Primer”—and why it’s okay to eat less kale—and “You’ll Eat Less Often If You Eat More Fat.” The exercise chapters begin with “Don’t Jog” (it just makes you hungry and trains muscle to tolerate more jogging while raising stressors like cortisol) and lead to a series of interval-training exercises and a suite of kettlebell lifts that greatly enhance strength and endurance. The balance of the book explains the science of nutrition and includes more than a dozen simple and delicious carb-free recipes. Thirty years ago Grant Petersen was an oat-bran-, egg-white-, lean-meat-eating exercise fanatic who wasn’t in great shape despite all that. Today, at sixty, he is in the best shape of his life with the blood panel to prove it.