The Book: Free the Animal, Beyond the Blog

It looks like we are all writing books at the moment!  Richard Nikoley of the Free the Animal blog has just published a book which condenses the lessons of several years of his blog into a great little introduction to the "paleo" philosophy.  I say philosophy because, rightly, Richard looks holistically at lots of elements - diet, exercise and general health lessons.

I have always thought of Richard as a proper blogger - he writes thoughtful posts that analyse and explain, that argue and promote positions.  He explains his own experiments and explorations.

(I always feel that my blog is a bit more modest  - it started as somewhere to collect bits and pieces of interesting things about fitness to resource my own thinking, a set of bookmarks really.)

I've been following his blog for years.  In fact, in my Google Reader it is still called Honesty Log, the name of the blog before he began to focus fully on paleo issues.  In those years I've seen him grow as a writer and thinker but mostly I've watched his physical transformation.  He has always been a pragmatist, taking a wide angle lens view of all this.  He is not a fundamentalist, he thinks things through rather than simply rejecting what doesn't fit orthodox paleo dogma.  

There is no single prescription here for a diet  - just as there are multiple ancestral diets, so there are multiple ways in which we can mimic them today.  Well maybe there is a prescription - EAT REAL FOOD and AVOID THINGS THAT ARE NOT REALLY FOOD.  Richard explains what these 2 classes are and contain.


So this book condenses years of his blog into 12 chapters, each with a different theme.  With clarity, wit and passion Richard explains his journey, his discoveries in these areas forging a nice  consistent body of knowledge, bound by simple principles.  I've read most of the key paleo texts - Ray Audette, Robb Wolf,  Mark Sisson,  Loren Cordain and several others. However I still got something from this book, as I said because of its passion and its style.  It exploits the new reality of ebooks - it is full of hyperlinks, to be read like a website.  It is a book for "surfing"  -  it leads you to explore other ideas, to research more and see where these ideas come from.

I like it - simple, logical, structured.  It tells a story of how Richard got to where he is and what that means.  He exploits the potential of ebooks to make something potentially much bigger than the basic 110 pages as you follow the links.

And the price.....$3.99!   He is giving it away at that price!


You can read more at Richard's blog here or just go via the links below:

How To Get It

To acquire your copy you have a number of options. You can purchase from the publisher, Hyperink, in PDF format at this link. Purchasing from them gives you not only a lifetime, 100% money back guarantee, but lifetime updates as well. I will be expanding the book over time.

You can also purchase it from Amazon for Kindle or Barnes & Noble for Nook. An edition for Apple iBook is planed for the near future and a print version will be out soon. For those without web-enabled devices or who purchase the print version, a website URL has been provided in the book that will give you a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of all of the dozens of links used as references to research and other articles on the Internet.