| Hey there, folks. This is the time of year that I start getting floods of messages about self-improvement, habits, and changes. Mostly about weight loss, but plenty of other topics come up, too. Someone just asked me: if I could give one piece of advice to my pre-Primal self, what would I say? The reader probably expected some profound philosophical response, bursting with hard-earned wisdom. But it's much simpler than that. Sometimes, one decision makes all of your other habits and goals easier to build into your life. When I first started troubleshooting my lifestyle a few decades ago, there was a lot of trial and error involved. I could have saved myself a lot of confusion if I had done one thing from the beginning. It seems so obvious now. But I have to remind myself that I had to learn through my own experiences and mistakes. I would have told my younger self: figure out metabolic flexibility first. Everything else will follow. As a sugar-burning endurance athlete, hunger dictated a lot of my schedule and my day: counting macros, making sure I was fueled enough, stopping what I was doing to eat every couple of hours, responding to drops in mood and energy. Now, appetite doesn't make any decisions for me. I've got that under control. It's not so much a weight maintenance issue for me. Instead, shifting my metabolism freed up a large percentage of effort that I could spend on other things. I know deep down that I could never have accomplished half of what I accomplished with the level of attention that the basic act of feeding used to consume. Am I saying that keeping carbs low made me successful? It had a role, yes. I didn't have to think as hard about macros, staying healthy, and staying full, or responding to glucose highs and crashes. Sure, there is a physical element too. Metabolic flexibility provides a strong foundation so that I can experiment with other eating styles when they interest me. No matter what I'm doing – all salads one week, carnivore for a month, eating pastries in the south of France, whatever it is – I have metabolic flexibility built in. | 