Food is one of the most ancient media of human cultural exchange. From the Last Supper to the dinner date, food is a sign of community. We show religious devotion by fasting; we mark our celebrations with feasting. Food is more than fuel; it’s one of the tools we use to construct our culture.

Unfortunately, you can break someone’s arm with a hammer just as easily as you can pound in a nail. For an eating disordered person, food isn’t nourishing. It’s destructive. Several different kinds of eating disorders have been officially recognized. Anorexia is pathological form of calorie restriction that can leave the patient emaciated and malnourished, and often with permanent medical problems. Binge eating disorder is the opposite: a compulsive form of eating far beyond the demands of hunger or nutrition. Bulimia is characterized by cycles of binging followed by purging by inducing vomiting or overdosing on laxatives. Orthorexia can appear similar to anorexia, but instead of a compulsive focus on calories, orthorexia involves a self-destructive preoccupation with eating the “right” foods.

These officially diagnosed forms of eating disorders don’t come close to covering all varieties of disordered eating patterns and unhealthy relationships with food. As generations of feminist scholars have pointed out, mainstream American food culture is one big eating disorder. The aggressively intrusive marketing and constant availability of hyper-palatable junk food collide with the ideal of thinness as not only a standard of beauty, but a sign of self-control and moral virtue. Women in particular are set up to be always wanting, yet always struggling to resist: just watch the yogurt commercials. Instead of a tool for building human relationships and sustaining a community, food becomes a tool for maintaining social pathologies and unhealthy power structures.

Eating Disorders and a Paleo Diet

But what does this have to do with Paleo? Sure, standard American food culture is disordered – that’s why we refuse to be part of it. We don’t demonize fat; we revel in it! We focus on eating whole, nourishing foods, and actually discourage calorie counting. Skinny might be the mainstream idea of beauty, but Paleo idealizes Crossfit babes. Shouldn’t Paleo be the solution to eating disorders?

Unfortunately, the picture isn’t nearly so rosy. The Paleo diet interacts with eating disorders in two ways. First, the diet itself can trigger orthorexia by feeding an unhealthy obsession with eating the “right” food. A great strength of Paleo is the focus on eating an optimal diet as determined by scientific evidence, rather than convenience, cheapness, or common knowledge. But with this kind of food analysis, more is frequently not better. The scientific approach to food can sometimes spiral out of control into an obsession with micronutrients and measurements all out of proportion to the actual health benefits: is my ratio of omega-3s to omega-6s optimal to the third decimal place? Exactly how many grams is a “medium” avocado, and is that with or without the skin? Especially on an extremely strict version of Paleo like the Whole30, it’s all too easy for the diet to consume your life to the point where your dedication to “health” is doing more harm than good.

One of the biggest challenges with orthorexia is determining the point where a commitment to eating healthy becomes compulsive and disordered. Toughing out the occasional ice cream craving doesn’t make you orthorexic. And self-assessments like this one are worse than useless: planning food for the next day is perfectly normal. The line is hard to draw. Eating disorders are too complicated to diagnose with a series of tick boxes, but the questions below can give you an idea of the type of self-reflection to begin with: answering “yes” to more than one or two of them should give you cause for serious concern.

• When you break your own food rules, do you feel like you’ve failed as a person?
• Do you assign extreme moral qualities to food, especially negative qualities (e.g. “white flour is evil. Sugar is the devil. I don’t need to abuse my body with poison like that.”)
• Are you nervous about eating something anyone else has cooked, even if the person tells you the ingredients?
• Do you frequently get frustrated because nutrition information isn’t precise enough?
• Do you feel fear or hatred for certain foods (not the people or the advertisers or the culture surrounding the foods, but the foods themselves)?
• Do you ever lose sleep worrying over something you ate or are considering eating?
• Do you consistently feel that you have to keep making your diet stricter and stricter?

The food you eat is not a measurement of your value as a human being: if your self-worth is based on the compulsive need to control every milligram of food in your “perfect” diet, you have a problem.

Paleo in itself can thus trigger an obsession with optimizing your diet, which can spiral into full-blown orthorexia. But the Paleo diet doesn’t exist in isolation: a more powerful force driving eating disordered behavior is the toxic food culture of the modern world. Most people discover Paleo as adults, after years of absorbing disordered attitudes towards food from mainstream culture. And even though you might eat Paleo, you still have to live in a world that doesn’t, where you absorb all kinds of messages about food, bodies, and emotions from your surroundings no matter how “immune” to advertisements you might think you are.

That emotional damage doesn’t magically disappear with the first bite of grass-fed beef. You can binge on nuts just as easily as you can binge on chocolate cake – changing the specific foods you eat won’t get rid of the psychological roots of an eating disorder. And culturally disordered eating patterns can be especially exhausting on the Paleo diet, because the struggle to eat Paleo in a hostile food culture is itself emotionally taxing. The sudden restriction of so many foods can feel like acute deprivation: “I’m not allowed to have pizza, or beer, or bread, or ice cream, or anything I like! I hate this!” This can lead to extremes: faced with the struggle to stick to Paleo in the face of temptation, who hasn’t felt the urge to demonize junk food? Sugar is evil! It’s poison! The dramatization makes you feel virtuous for resisting, but assigning extreme moral values to food can feed right into orthorexia, because it makes everything you eat indicative of how good or evil of a person you are. Taking such an extreme and morally judgmental attitude towards “good” and “evil” foods can also exacerbate a binge eating disorder – as Geneen Roth points out, binge eating and restriction are two sides of the same coin. For a recovering anorexic, the restriction of certain food types can trigger the restriction of calories as well.

It’s not the Paleo diet itself that triggers these problems. It’s the effort of maintaining the Paleo diet within a wider culture of disordered eating (if Krispy Kreme didn’t exist, nobody would feel deprived for not being allowed to have it). But as long as that culture stays the same, the Paleo community will still have to deal with its effects.

Paleo Living with an Eating Disorder

Eating disorders (or just disordered attitudes towards food in general) are tough to live with – but they’re not impossible.

If you have an eating disorder so severe that you’ve lost your period or become too underweight to participate in normal activities, if you induce vomiting and vomit blood, if you self-harm or have suicidal thoughts, or if you’re in any other extreme danger, put down the computer and call a doctor. Right now. You cannot get the help you need from a stranger on the internet.

If your disordered eating patterns are less extreme, you might benefit from some or all of the following suggestions. Eating disorders vary so widely that no one piece of advice is applicable to everyone; as with most other aspects of Paleo, the only way to find out is to hold a test run with yourself and take stock of the results.

First, if an arbitrary set of rules like the Whole30 is triggering you into an unhealthy relationship with food, give yourself permission to stop. It doesn’t make you a quitter; it doesn’t make you a failure. Think of it like taking a rest day from exercise. If it’s really on your bucket list to finish the program, it’ll still be there in six months. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon every effort to eat healthy and embrace a diet of McFlurries and nacho cheese. Stick to the Paleo basics, and in place of whatever set of rules you’re giving up, make a commitment to yourself: you will allow yourself to eat the real food that your body needs, without fear or shame or self-loathing. Don’t restrict your food choices further than that. Fruit is real food. Fructose isn’t a raging wolf of obesity and diabetes ready to maul you if you look sideways at a banana. You haven’t failed as a human being because you ate that box of raisins. When you feel the inevitable urge to start restricting yourself to an ever-purer diet, remind yourself of your decision. Take a deep breath and give yourself permission to relax.

While unhealthily restricting your diet can trigger disordered eating patterns, certain dietary changes can also help beat an eating disorder. Fat, in particular, is your new best friend. Fat promotes satiety, leaving you less susceptible to binging because you don’t feel restricted or deprived. A high fat breakfast can be especially helpful. Fat can also help when you’re fighting off a binge: eating a spoon full of coconut oil or a pat of butter often helps suppress the urge.

Fat isn’t only helpful for binge eaters: for recovering anorexics, it can be great way to get in enough calories without that disgusting “over-stuffed” feeling of eating more than your stomach is used to handling. Since fat has more calories per ounce than protein or carbohydrates, you don’t need to eat the same physical volume of food to get enough calories. If the sensation of eating animal fat physically disgusts you, try avocados or nuts, which have a completely different texture.

Besides making sure to get enough fat, many people on a very low carbohydrate diet find that increasing their carbs improves their mood and gives them more energy overall. If you have trouble with binging on carbohydrate-rich foods like bread or pasta, try increasing your intake of Paleo-friendly starches like sweet potatoes: maybe your body just does better on a higher carbohydrate diet.

Macronutrients aren’t the only dietary factor that can affect eating disorders. If you have frequent urges to binge on very specific foods, track your diet for a few days to make sure you’re getting all your required daily micronutrients: sometimes, a binge is your body’s way of forcing you to get something it needs, and incorporating that element into your regular diet can help. And if you’re recovering from anorexia or orthorexia, you may want to get blood tests done: your restrictive behavior may have left you with important nutrient deficiencies. Once you know what you’re deficient in, you can adjust your diet to include higher levels of that nutrient, or take supplements as necessary (although supplements should be a fallback, not your first choice: getting nutrients from a proper diet is always preferable to taking them as pills).

Dietary changes can help you cope with an eating disorder, but since unhealthy eating patterns are about food culture, not just about food, you can’t fully address them without tackling the mental aspects. The first step to this is self-reflection: what about your environment triggers (or triggered) your disordered eating patterns? Something as simple as keeping a food journal can yield surprising revelations – every time you eat, write down what you ate, what environment you ate in (in the car, at your table, at work), and how you felt at the time. You’ll start to see patterns: certain people or situations that trigger your disordered behavior.

Once you start to notice the patterns, ask yourself how you can change your habits to avoid the triggers in the first place. If you always binge after a hellish day at work because you drive home past Cold Stone and you just can’t resist when you’re already upset, drive home a different way. If your coworkers spend their lunch hour counting the calories in their celery sticks, eat lunch somewhere else. If PaleoHacks triggers you into overanalyzing every bite of food, read the paper instead. Stress and fatigue can be triggers in themselves, and, by wearing you down, they make every other trigger that much harder to face down: do whatever you can to cut chronic stress out of your life, and commit to eight hours of sleep every night.

If you can’t get away from your triggers immediately, start making a plan for the long term. And in the meantime, focus on damage control. How can you handle the trigger in a healthier way? Some people use a mantra; try writing yourself an affirmation that you’re strong and you can deal with this. Others find it helpful to redirect their emotions into something else – a journal, a phone call to a friend, or maybe a punching bag. If the trigger creates an emotional need (to punish yourself, reward yourself, distract yourself, or anything else), fill it. But fill it with something other than food.

Avoiding triggers and redirecting your responses away from food can be mind-bendingly difficult at first, but eventually your new behaviors become habitual – you learn to respond to these situations by doing something other than eating.
Possibly the most valuable of all resources for dealing with an eating disorder is support. You don’t have to go this alone. Talk to anyone you feel comfortable talking to. Support from someone who loves you can make all the difference in the world, especially when the going gets tough. And it will get tough. Inevitably, you’ll stumble and have to pick yourself back up, only to stumble again. It’s a lot easier to get back up the second (and third, and tenth, and five millionth) time if you have someone to give you a hand.

Even if you have the best planning and support in the world, dealing with an eating disorder is brutal. And we live surrounded by a culture that sells them from 50-foot billboards: you’re in the trenches under heavy bombardment, every minute of every day. But an eating disorder doesn’t have to ruin your life. You’ll get knocked down – that’s fine. Just don’t stay down. You’re stronger than that.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

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Diabetes: The Basics

Diabetes is essentially an inability of the body to regulate insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas to metabolize glucose. The disease has three forms: Type 1Diabetes (T1D), Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), and Gestational Diabetes. Type 1 diabetics simply cannot produce insulin, due to an autoimmune response in the pancreas. Type 2 diabetics have a different problem: their pancreas produces too much insulin, causing an inflammatory condition known as insulin resistance. Gestational diabetes is a temporary condition similar to T2D in a pregnant woman, usually triggered around the 24th week.

All three types of diabetes do have some basis in genetics, but genes can’t account for the whole story. Even if you carry a gene linked to diabetes, certain environmental factors have to be present to trigger the expression of the gene. Similarly, pregnancy can naturally cause a temporary state of insulin resistance in the mother, but this brief insulin resistance doesn’t inevitably develop into full-blown diabetes. This is where the modern diet and lifestyle come in. The dietary toxins, environmental pollutants, and sedentary lifestyle of the modern world trigger the expression of the diabetes genes, causing the disease to rear its ugly head.

Diabetes and the Modern Lifestyle

The most obvious culprit for diabetes is the modern diet. Insulin regulation is one of the physiological processes most deranged by a modern diet based heavily on sugar and carbohydrates. When you eat any kind of carbohydrate, your body converts it into glucose. Your bloodstream can’t handle too much glucose at once, so beta cells in your pancreas respond by producing the hormone insulin, which lets the glucose into your muscles. Your muscles store the glucose as glycogen, which they can then use as fuel. This saves your bloodstream from an overload of glucose, and gives your muscles a ready supply of fuel – or at least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. The modern diet and lifestyle derail this system with a one-two punch: too many carbs and not enough exercise.

When you don’t exercise, but continue to eat carbohydrates without burning the fuel already in your muscles, the muscle cells get full The insulin receptors in your muscles become fewer and less efficient, fighting back against the insulin that’s trying to force more glucose into them. In response, your pancreas increases production of insulin, trying to signal the muscles to let the glucose in. Your muscles have locked the door, plugged their headphones in, and cranked up the volume, but your pancreas just keeps knocking louder and louder. This creates a positive feedback loop, where your muscles react to the increase in insulin by becoming even more insulin resistant, which triggers the pancreas to produce even more. Meanwhile, the extra glucose is stored as fat instead. Eventually, the cycle creates full-blown insulin resistance: you can no longer metabolize carbohydrates effectively, and you’re on the verge of developing Type 2 Diabetes.

Insulin resistance brought on by too many carbohydrates is just one way that the modern world contributes to diabetes. Exposure to dietary and environmental toxins also triggers another aspect of diabetes: the autoimmune response. Gluten, seed oils, and industrially processed sugar don’t just present your body with more carbs than it can handle; they’re harmful in and of themselves because they provide these toxins with an avenue into your body. These elements in your diet produce inflammation in your gut, and increase the permeability of your intestinal walls, causing a condition known as “leaky gut.” A leaky gut allows all the toxins in your environment a pathway out to the rest of your body, where they cause autoimmune responses, including the autoimmune response in the pancreas that contributes to Type 1 Diabetes. The environmental toxins in our air and water contribute to the same problems – and a leaky gut allows them to range free in your body.

A third characteristic of diabetes is inflammation. As well as the inflammation leading to a leaky gut, diabetes is tied to systemic inflammation at every point in the disease. When insulin resistance forces your body to store glucose in your fat cells instead of your muscles, your fat cells become inflamed from the glucose overload. Meanwhile, the glucose floating around in your bloodstream is causing systemic inflammation. Inflammation itself contributes to insulin resistance, so the cycle of inflammation becomes a positive feedback loop driving your body into an increasingly disordered state.

The modern lifestyle thus contributes to all three types of diabetes: the combination of insulin resistance, autoimmunity, and systemic inflammation can develop into full-blown Type 2 or Gestational Diabetes, or trigger the autoimmune response of Type 1. Diabetes first causes symptoms like frequent urination, extreme hunger or thirst, inexplicable weight loss, tingling or numbness in your hands and feet, intense fatigue, dry skin, and vision changes. Left untreated, it can lead to complications like heart disease, hypertension, kidney disease, blindness, nervous system damage, and dental disease.

Diabetes is also, of course, tied to obesity – so much so that one doctor coined the term “diabesity” to refer to the whole array of metabolic dysfunction and blood sugar imbalances characterizing the modern lifestyle. The insulin resistance in your muscles keeps you in fat storage mode, so you continue to gain weight. Even worse, the same insulin resistance that keeps sugar out of your muscles also blocks amino acids from entering, so you start to loose muscle mass on top of gaining fat. Obesity in turn can contribute to diabetes: if you’re already overweight, you’re less likely to exercise, exacerbating the oversupply of glucose in your bloodstream. But diabetes isn’t restricted to the obese: even lean and healthy-looking individuals can have a damaged metabolism and poor sugar regulation. In fact, diabetes can be even more dangerous for these people, since it might never occur to them as a possible cause of their symptoms.

Diabetes and a Paleo Diet

Diabetes is clearly a pressing health problem. But mainstream medical advice is worse than inadequate: it actually contributes to the problem. Diabetics are commonly obese because excess carbohydrates get stored as fat, not because they eat too much fat, but official guidelines still stuck in a “low-fat” model of healthy diet recommend a “diabetes food pyramid” with carbs at the base – about 60-70% of daily calories. If you want to get diabetes, the diabetes food pyramid is a great way to start.

Rather than adding even more carbs as fuel for the fire of insulin resistance, Paleo nutrition fights diabetes by addressing the heart of the problem: a diet and lifestyle that simply aren’t adapted to your body’s needs. A diet based in fat and protein instead of carbohydrates doesn’t trigger the huge glucose spikes that lead to insulin resistance. A diet without processed frankenfoods and unpronounceable ingredients doesn’t contain the seed oils and other toxins that can set off an autoimmune response. A diet that emphasizes grass-fed meat and organic produce cuts down your exposure to various other toxins in the modern food supply. A diet without gluten and lectins to irritate your system doesn’t cause systemic inflammation or leaky gut. And contrary to popular opinion, red meat doesn’t cause diabetes; neither does a high fat diet. The Paleo diet does look drastically different from the mainstream nutritional guidelines, but considering how badly mainstream nutritional science has failed generations of diabetics, that should be more reassuring than worrying.

As well as eating the right food, the Paleo lifestyle also emphasizes regular physical activity and adequate sleep, both important factors in controlling diabetes. Your body is an integrated system, with every aspect of your life affecting every other one: even if you eat the most optimal diet, sleep deprivation or lack of exercise will still have negative effects.

By encouraging a lifestyle in line with your body’s natural processes, the Paleo diet removes the environmental triggers that bring on and exacerbate diabetes. And it works. On top of countless individual stories, clinical studies have proven Paleo to be very effective at controlling diabetes – even more so than the famous Mediterranean diet. It’s been so successful, in fact, that even mainstream media outlets have taken notice.

Although any variation of Paleo is healthier for a diabetic than following the guidelines in the standard food pyramid, various tweaks to the basic diet can make it even more specifically adapted to controlling diabetes. Some people on the Paleo diet use artificial sweeteners in place of sugar, but while they may not trigger insulin spikes, zero-calorie sweeteners like aspartame can damage your pancreas in other ways and trigger sugar cravings, so diabetics should avoid them anyway. (And for everyone trying to steer clear of sweeteners but confused by tongue-twisting ingredient labels, the Whole9 provides a useful list of all the different names for sugar and artificial sweeteners.)

Diabetics may also find it helpful to limit consumption of fruit, especially dried fruit – it is technically Paleo, but the high amounts of sugar make it less than ideal for anyone with carbohydrate metabolism problems. Dairy triggers a large release of insulin, so you may want to avoid dairy products. Taking a probiotic can help repair the damage to your gut flora. If you suffer from a leaky gut, avoiding nuts, nightshades, and eggs can also help. Since every person’s body has slightly different reactions, the best way to tailor a Paleo diet to your specific needs is to experiment – and if you’re confused by your results or want a second opinion, PaleoHacks is always a good place to ask.

All the dietary tweaking in the world can’t do much good if you don’t have a solid idea of how different foods affect your blood sugar levels. Investing in a glucometer can be helpful whether or not you think you have a blood sugar problem: if you catch unhealthy insulin levels early, treatment is easier and more effective.

Tests administered by your doctor can also be helpful – but with two caveats. First, a “normal” reading doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re home free: even blood sugar levels on the high end of “normal” can predict problems in the future. Double-check your “normal” results to make sure you aren’t heading for trouble down the line. Second, on a low-carb Paleo diet, don’t worry too much about a high result from an oral glucose tolerance test. In an OGTT, you ingest 100 grams of pure glucose, and your doctor measures your insulin response. But 100 grams at once is a lot of glucose even for someone on a carb-heavy modern diet (you’d have to chug an entire liter of coke to get that much sugar). If you’re eating low-carb Paleo, your body is completely unused to handling huge rushes of glucose, so you might react poorly to the test despite having healthy blood sugar levels overall.

Conclusion

The Paleo diet isn’t a magical diabetes cure-all that can take 20 pounds off your stomach and eliminate your insulin resistance overnight. Type 1 is especially difficult to treat, since after a certain point the autoimmune response can permanently damage the pancreas. While some patients do completely eliminate their symptoms, more often a Paleo diet helps control the symptoms of diabetes, reduce your dependence on insulin, and delay or prevent serious side effects. But even when you struggle, you won’t struggle alone – the Paleo community is full of welcoming, knowledgeable people at least one of whom has probably been in your shoes. Diabetes has no quick fix, but you are worth the effort it takes to eliminate modern toxins and eat and move the way your body was designed to.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

Register for my free newsletter and I’ll send you a free preview of the cookbook right away. Simply enter your email:

That guy is killing himself – literally. The vicious cycle of stress and sleep deprivation wreaks havoc on every major system in your body, even on the strictest of Paleo diets. To be truly healthy, you need to break this cycle by prioritizing sleep and managing your stress.

Acute Stress and the Stress Response

The problem with the modern lifestyle isn’t the presence of stress. Your body was designed to deal with stress. The problem is the kind of stress.

Stress falls into two broad categories: acute and chronic. Acute stress is short but intense. A five-year-old runs out of nowhere right in front of your car. Your heart stops. Your stomach jolts. You slam down the brakes and swerve to avoid the kid. As the car squeals to a halt, your palms sweat and you can hear your heart pounding. You tremble when you reach to unlock the door. Even if nobody got hurt, you probably feel shaken up for at least a few minutes.

Acute stress is the stress your body was built to handle. When you see that kid, your nervous system puts all nonessential functions on pause and throws you into a hyper-aware “fight or flight” mode to maximize your ability to handle the situation. The “stress hormones” adrenaline/epinephrine, noradrenaline/norepinephrine, and dopamine flood through your body, sharpening your reflexes and giving you razor-focused concentration. Your adrenal cortex raises production of another stress hormone called cortisol: this quickly releases glycogen stores to your muscles for a burst of energy.

Essentially, your body thinks you’re in immediate, life-threatening danger and prioritizes its resources accordingly. To give your muscles and reflexes as much energy as you have available, cortisol suppresses immune function, digestion, and everything else that your body can temporarily put on hold. It’s the most useful response your body could possibly have to an emergency situation that requires extraordinary effort.

Chronic Stress and the Sleep-Stress Cycle

Compared to this kind of acute stress, a bad job or a looming term paper seems like small fry. If your system can handle the shock of nearly running someone over, can’t it deal with a micromanaging boss? Not as well, unfortunately. The problem stems from a mismatch between the kind of stress you face and the kind of stress your body thinks you’re facing. While everyone has the occasional near miss with a toddler on his new trike or a rogue pit bull who got off the leash, most modern stress is not acute. It’s chronic. Where acute stress is high-intensity in the short term, chronic stress is low-intensity but long-term. Chronic stress is the 9-to-5 that turns into 9-to-6 that turns into 9-to-7 even though you scarf down lunch at your desk and take work home at night. It’s gluten inflaming your gut, or overtraining exhausting your body. Even though these are low-level stresses rather than emergencies, your body can’t tell the difference. From your adrenal glands’ perspective, your overbearing supervisor might as well be a hungry lion chasing you – for eight hours every day. Faced with constant stress, it continues to react, leading to a vicious cycle that’s inextricably tied up with another vital component of well-being: sleep. Chronic stress and sleep deprivation are mutually reinforcing, trapping you in a vicious cycle that wears down every major system in your body.

Your hormonal system is one of the major victims of chronic stress. In healthy circumstances, your body maintains a balance between stress and relaxation, regulated by the cycle of two hormones: cortisol (which stimulates wakefulness) and melatonin (which causes sleep). Cortisol and melatonin naturally fluctuate during the day in a cycle known as your circadian rhythms – cortisol peaks in the morning and dips in the evening, when melatonin takes over during sleep.

By stimulating continuous production of cortisol, chronic stress causes imbalances in your hormonal cycle and disruption of your circadian rhythms. Instead of giving way to melatonin in the evening, cortisol stays high, leaving you lying awake worrying because your body never got the signal to wind down and prepare for sleep. Even if you do fall asleep, elevated cortisol can disrupt the rhythms of your natural sleep cycle, making your sleep not as restful. Sleep deprivation it itself a stressor, so the cycle becomes self-perpetuating.

Another way chronically high cortisol disturbs your hormonal balance is by causing a condition called adrenal fatigue. In the short term, cortisol robs your digestive and immune systems of energy to give you a rush of strength: essentially, adrenal fatigue is the price you pay when your body extends this emergency trade-off into the long run. Both the elevated cortisol and the resulting sleep deprivation lower your immune system: you get sick more easily and take longer to recover. The long-term suppression of your digestive system also causes all kinds of problems. It harms the beneficial bacteria that support your digestive system, and contributes to and exacerbates gastrointestinal disorders like GERD, IBS, and even food allergies. And just when a poor diet will affect you the most, it’s hardest to maintain, since sleep deprivation decreases your self-control and makes you more susceptible to the siren call of junk food. As well as its immediate effects, adrenal fatigue can cause thyroid problems and other hormone imbalances. Since illness and gut inflammation are themselves stressors to your system, this contributes to the cycle of stress generating more stress.

The sleep-stress cycle also affects your weight. Chronically elevated cortisol creates insulin resistance by maintaining a constant rush of glucose to your muscles. Insulin spikes in response, and eventually you become insulin resistant. Insulin resistance causes weight gain – especially since cortisol is already signaling your body to store fat. Weight gain furthers the sleep/stress cycle, since being overweight is a risk factor for a condition called sleep apnea, which is when your sleep is repeatedly disrupted as you periodically stop breathing during the night. The resulting sleep deprivation, in turn, also contributes to insulin resistance – and on top of that, it stops your liver from processing fat, (causing your body to store the fat instead), and promotes weight gain by increasing your levels of ghrelin (the hunger hormone) and inhibiting production of leptin. The cycle of stress and sleep deprivation can also lock you into the cycle of weight gain.

Your body’s natural and hormonal responses aren’t the only driving factors in the sleep-stress cycle. Most people’s conscious reactions to stress and fatigue also continue it. On the simplest level of external response, chronic stressors in your life often drive you to skimp on sleep to deal with them – sometimes, that’s one reason why they’re stressful. A demanding job, a heavy college courseload, or a new baby can eat into your rest. And working through the fatigue the next day can make you inefficient, meaning that you need even more time to get everything done, and forcing you to stay up even later to finish.

Many people also choose to handle their sleep deprivation by loading up on stimulants – Starbucks didn’t get so successful because we’re all well-rested and content with our lives. Caffeine, most people’s stimulant of choice, blocks receptors for adenosine, one of the inhibitory hormones that balance excitatory hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Caffeine makes you feel less tired by disrupting your body’s natural cycle of wakefulness and sleepiness. But caffeine doesn’t solve the problem; it just masks it – and, like any other drug, your body eventually becomes resistant and starts to need more and more. Too much caffeine can start to disturb your rest even when you do want to sleep, forcing you to rely on even more coffee the next day. Caffeine overload thus creates another self-perpetuating cycle of sleep deprivation and hormonal derangement.

The problems listed above would be bad enough, but the sleep/stress cycle also generates all kinds of miscellaneous disorders. As if your body needed another problem at this point, both sleep deprivation and your hormonal response to chronic stress cause systemic inflammation, a contributing factor for heart disease and kidney problems. Sleep deprivation also reduces your body’s capacity to handle oxidative stress, the harmful buildup of junk proteins in your cells that drives the aging process. This means that sleep debt imitates aging, with all of its associated functional problems. Even beyond the physical consequences, sleep deprivation impairs your memory and basic cognitive functions, and can contribute to mood disorders like depression.

Breaking the Sleep-Stress Cycle

Sleep deprivation and stress derange every major system in your body and feed off each other in a cycle that can make the most energetic person miserable. Robb Wolf sums it up: “how you feel when you are sleep deprived is likely how you will feel if you are both diabetic and old.” Nobody wants to stay stuck in this cycle – but in the context of the modern world, breaking it can pose a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Fortunately, since every part of the cycle builds on all the other parts, every small change can create a ripple effect, giving you more energy and motivation to stay on track.

Since many of us have more control over our sleeping habits than our stress load, making sleep a priority can be one way to break into the cycle. First and foremost, make sleep a priority – more important than the dishes, more important than the laundry, and definitely more important than reruns of Battlestar Galactica. You will never “have time.” You have to make time. Commit to eight hours as a start, and adjust as needed. Consider creating a nightly routine to keep yourself on track, so you don’t get caught off-guard trying to finish five different chores in the last ten minutes before bed.

It’s not just the amount of sleep you get that matters: timing counts, too. One way you can reduce the damage of stress and sleep deprivation is to support the natural pattern of your circadian rhythms. The 24-hour cycle of light and darkness controls the cycle of your hormones – you evolved to react to approximately 14 hours of darkness every day, but most of us spend all our waking hours in some kind of light, with our experience of darkness compressed into the short window when we’re actually sleeping. While it’s probably impractical to stop work when the sun sets, you can still minimize the damage. Of all the colors on the spectrum, blue light most strongly stimulates your body to stay awake – avoid it for at least an hour before bedtime. If you use your computer in the evenings, consider downloading f.lux to shift your screen over to the red spectrum.

All kinds of other cues also affect your circadian rhythms, although not as strongly. Food and exercise also affect the cycle of wakefulness and sleep; the effect is strong enough that one self-experimenter found that intermittent fasting helped reset his circadian rhythms. Sound cues like birdsong also trigger your body to begin the process of waking up. Even the rhythms of the people around you can affect yours, another reason to encourage everyone you live with to join you in your quest for healthy sleep patterns.

When you make an effort to respect your natural circadian rhythms, your sleep patterns may not adhere to standard expectations of eight uninterrupted hours. Some research points to the conclusion that we naturally fall into a “biphasic” sleep pattern: 4 hours of sleep followed by a brief period of wakefulness, and then four more hours of sleep. And you don’t only have to sleep at night: even though they can’t replace a solid night of sleep, naps can help – and they certainly don’t hurt. As your hormones regain a healthy balance, you’ll become more aware of the best sleeping pattern for your body.

Besides respecting your natural rhythms, practicing good sleep hygiene can go a long way towards reducing insomnia and making your sleep as restful as possible. Sleep hygiene doesn’t just refer to when you last washed your pillowcase. It means making your sleep environment as uncluttered and restful as possible. Your bedroom should be dark and quiet – use heavy curtains or a sleep mask to block out ambient light from streetlights and your neighbors’ windows, and turn off any flashing electronic gadgets. If you hear any ambient noise, invest in a set of earplugs. Keep the room at a comfortable temperature – many people prefer to sleep in a cooler room.

Your bed itself plays a huge role in your quality of sleep: make sure to find a mattress you feel comfortable on. Some people feel more comfortable sleeping on the floor, a practice that makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint but might not have definitive health benefits. Whatever surface you prefer to sleep on, do pay attention to your sleeping posture.

Diet can also contribute to healthy sleep patterns. Eating too close to bedtime can keep you awake, but if you have trouble falling asleep hungry, make sure to eat enough at dinner, so you still feel full at bedtime. Make sure you get enough fat, carbohydrates, and Vitamin B6. Any drugstore carries a whole shelf of sleeping pills, but avoid these unless you’ve exhausted all other options: many of them have such serious side effects that they can do more harm than good, and a healthy person shouldn’t need them.

Fixing your sleep patterns can help you break into the sleep/stress cycle, but you should also pay attention to reducing and managing your stress. Stress can be harder to approach directly, because many of us have little to no control over at least one major stressor in our lives. If you can get rid of stress in your life, by all means do so. Stress caused by your own behavior is an easy target: stop overtraining, and eliminate dietary factors like gluten that produce stress through systemic inflammation. But for stressors beyond your control, you’ll probably have to focus on stress management instead.

There are as many stress management techniques in the world as there are people under stress. One popular method is meditation. Meditation can stimulate the relaxation response, the cycle of inhibitory, calming hormones that chronic stress suppresses. Meditation can be as simple as closing your eyes and deliberately relaxing the tension in your body one muscle at a time – it doesn’t have to involve ritual chanting, complicated poses, or a state of total serenity. The Body Scan meditation by Malcolm Huxter is a great guide for beginners attempting this for the first time – it walks you through your body one area at a time. The Zen Mountain Monastery also provides a guide to getting started with meditation, including a set of useful photos of proper posture in various positions. Meditation takes many forms – experiment with different positions, music, mantras, and lengths to find something that leaves you feeling calmer and more peaceful.

If you do better with a more concrete activity, try creating a gratitude list, keeping a humor journal, or writing about your stress – journaling can help organize your thoughts and release some of the tension. You can get creative with writing, too – go ahead and write out that scathingly witty email you’d love to send your crazy boss – on a sheet of notebook paper to laugh over later.

Regular activity can also help reduce stress. While overtraining contributes to chronic stress, making a habit of healthy exercise keeps your body strong and resilient. In the moment, a brisk walk can help you disengage and get some perspective on a stressful situation, making it easier to handle. Diet, of course, also plays a role: as well as cutting out foods that cause stress, make sure you’re getting enough antioxidants and nutrients. Taking a probiotic can help alleviate the damage that cortisol does to your gut flora. While “comfort foods” like ice cream and pizza will do more harm than good, a healthy diet can go a long way towards managing your stress.

Communications technology has become so pervasive that many of us don’t even realize how much it taxes our system with constant demands to pay attention to each new thing. Deliberately disconnecting from the constant cycle of stimuli can also help reduce your stress. You might need a smartphone for your job, but turn it off when you get home, and don’t check your work email until you’re back in the office. A media fast can restore some sanity if your blog reader or Netflix queue is out of control: it takes discipline to disconnect, but the result is worth it.

An exhaustive list of every useful stress management technique could fill an encyclopedia. Evaluate your own situation: what exactly is the stressor? Within the context of your particular situation, how can you change the stressor, change your response, or distance yourself enough to make the stress manageable? Sometimes just evaluating the situation and making a plan can help – if you’re stuck in a bad job, for example, updating your resume and firing off a couple applications can make you feel less victimized and more proactive.

Conclusion

Chronic stress is a modern monster. In some ways, the sleep/stress cycle can be even harder to tackle than the modern diet because it involves a drastic change in the most basic rhythms of your life. You can bring Paleo food to work and share a meal with a table full of coworkers chowing down on pasta and Big Macs, but there’s no way to join in a late-night video gam e marathon if you’re busy getting enough sleep to wake up refreshed the next morning.

Unfortunately, beating chronic stress and getting the sleep your body needs are as important as they are difficult. The hormonal imbalances and metabolic derangement of the sleep/stress cycle can do every bit as much damage as a diet full of sugar and gluten – and stumbling around in a constant haze of nervous exhaustion is no way to spend your life. Find a combination of stress management techniques that works for you, and make a commitment to reclaiming your sleep from the endless series of demands on your time.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

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A little while back I shared a chocolate avocado pudding recipe that was quite delicious and unusual. I know a few people were skeptical about the idea, but after trying it the concerns went away. This recipe intrigued me to find some similar ideas, mainly because it was so good, but also because it’s a really versatile dish. It can be suitable as a snack, a dessert or even a special breakfast.

Following along the lines of using avocados to create a rich and smooth texture and cocoa powder to give it a nice chocolaty taste, this following chocolate avocado mousse is definitely a great Paleo treat. This one calls for some walnuts to create a tasty and crunchy crust. Kids will love it and it makes for a great Paleo alternative to small and very unhealthy cakes that most children bring in their lunch to school.

Like the chocolate avocado pudding, this recipe should be considered a treat and consumed with moderation. It calls for small amounts of maple syrup and raw honey, which are natural sweeteners, but high in fructose nonetheless. It also calls for walnuts, which are loaded in nutrients, but also loaded with omega-6 fats. Again, when enjoyed from time to time, this recipe is a great Paleo treat that might allow you to more easily stay on track by satisfying a craving, but it should still only be a treat, not an everyday snack.

Many people are put off by the combination of avocado with sweet tasting ingredients, but this is the time to suspend disbelief and try it anyway. You’ll see that the avocado taste is only really subtle and that the avocado are there mainly to help bring a great richness to this recipe. As a plus, avocados are loaded with potassium, vitamin E and healthy monounsaturated fats.

The dish is nicely finished up with a garnish of colorful, juicy and antioxidant-rich pomegranate seeds. Check out the roasted cauliflower with mint and pomegranate for tips on how to properly handle and de-seed pomegranates with staining your fingers or clothes.

Give this recipe a shot, it’s bound to work!

Chocolate avocado mousse recipe

Serves 6

Ingredients

Crust

• 1 1/2 cups walnuts;
• 2 tbsp maple syrup;
• A pinch of salt;

Mousse

• 4 ripe avocados;
• 10 very soft dates, pitted;
• 4 tbsp raw honey;
• 2 tbsp raw cocoa powder;
• Seeds of 1 pomegranate;

Preparation

1. Begin by making the crust. Using a food processor, grind up the walnuts until small chunks are produced. Continue grinding and add the maple syrup and salt. You will know the mixture is combined, as it will be sticky and come together quite easily.
2. Using 8 small ramequins, put a few tablespoons of the walnut mixture into each one of them. Press the mixture into the bottom of the individual ramequins so that a round disc forms. Place the individual ramequins in the refrigerator so that the crust can harden in the colder temperatures.
3. Remove the skin and pits of the avocados and place the flesh in a food processor. Process and add the dates, honey and cocoa powder. Make sure you process until completely smooth.
4. Remove the ramequins from the refrigerator. Place the mousse in a piping bag and pipe it out atop the crust in the individual ramequins. You can create a makeshift piping bag with a simple zip-lock or freezer bag but cutting one corner with scissors.
5. Finish it all off by garnishing with the pomegranate seeds.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

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First Place

Alex takes the first place with the cauliflower crust pizza topped with garlic and lemon seasoned chicken, spinach, basil and onions, with a tomato sauce. This certainly gained extra points for creativity!

Alex will enjoy a Steve’s Club Sampler, a Seasonal Sampler and a $50 gift certificate to spend on more Steve’s Original products!

Second Place

Mike’s fig stuffed pork chops earned the second place! This creative dish is something I have to try, as the unique combination seems like it would be a perfect fit!

A Steve’s Club Sampler will be delivered right to Mike’s door to enjoy!

Third Place

Julie shared this mouth-watering picture of her BBQ’d steak with mushroom and onion toppings, alongside a garden salad and some roasted cauliflower and broccoli. It’s a fairly traditional meal when it comes to Paleo cooking, which makes it and meals alike a favorite in most kitchens.

Julie will also get a Steve’s Club Sampler for submitting her great meal idea.

Aside from our top contestants, there are just a few honorable mentions we must make. Both these participants could not be considered for a prize due to their location, but what they prepared is certainly prize worthy.

Special mentions

Crystal from Australia blew us away with her burger stack! A hearty looking beef patty with sandwiched between grilled sweet potato, with avocado, tomato, shallots, mustard and homemade aioli. Yum! I also must mention how beautiful the picture is.

We were honored to find out about Marcus who participated all the way from Afghanistan! His first picture is of him in a small green house that he cares for and grows all his fresh vegetables in. It’s very remarkable! He then goes on to share an picture of a delicious salad he made from his fresh crop.

A very special thank you is owed to Steve’s Original for the amazing prizes! Steve makes living a healthy life easier by offering a great selection of paleo snacks, including dried fruit, nuts and an assortment of meat jerky.

Many thanks to all the participants! We will be running more contests in the very near future, so be sure to stay tuned in.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

Register for my free newsletter and I’ll send you a free preview of the cookbook right away. Simply enter your email:

Being able to prepare a very healthy meal in a limited amount of time is something that the majority of people long for (especially when children are apart of the equation). With a lot of experience in the kitchen, I can say that fish is by far the best way to go in order to achieve this. If you pair it up with some easy sides, fish takes no time at all to grill up on the BBQ, or roast in the oven.

Aside from the fact that preparation and cooking time is super quick and easy, fish is a a great source of various important nutrients. For example, fish is usually a great source of selenium, which is an essential and much needed nutrient that acts as an antioxidant. Most people need more selenium in their diet. In addition to that, fatty fish like salmon, trout and mackerel are great source of vitamin A, vitamin D and fresh Omega-3 fat, provided they are wild and not farmed. The omega-3 fat is a very important component, important enough to warrant the regular consumption of fatty wild fish. Omega-3 fats are very important to counter-balance Omega-6 consumption, but it’s usually a good idea to only get it from fresh fish because supplements go rancid very quickly in the presence of heat, light or oxygen and rancid Omega-3 is not a good idea at all.

I opted to use salmon for this dish; however, you are not at all restricted to it. Any fish option would work well with this combination. That being said, I would recommend a more strong tasting fish like tuna, or sea-bass. You need to work with something that will absorb the strong flavours and counter them well. If you choose to go with something not as strong like a white fish, I would slightly lessen the amount of lemon and garlic used in the marinade.

The cherry tomato salsa compliments the fish very well. This is a really good way to serve fish for people who are not fond of it, as the salsa helps down-play the taste of the fish a little bit. It’s also quite refreshing every time you bite into a juicy tomato. This simple salsa is one I’ve used as a garnish for various types of fish, as well as meat. In fact, it’s best paired up with a meaty piece of steak fresh off the BBQ. This is the same for the asparagus. It’s arguably the simplest way to prepare it, yet it’s more than enough to make it absolutely delicious.

Prior to jumping into the preparation work, make sure you read the multiple recipes and instructions over, as time can be saved by preparing one part while another cooks. For example, it’s best to prepare the cherry tomato salsa while the salmon is marinating in the refrigerator.

Salmon preparation

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 4 wild salmon fillets, skin-on;
• 2 cloves garlic, minced;
• 1/2 tsp sea salt;
• 1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper;
• 1/2 tsp paprika;
• 1 tsp lemon zest;
• 1 tsp fresh lemon juice;
• 1 tbsp olive oil;

Preparation

1. Set your oven to broil.
2. In a small bowl, combine the garlic, salt, pepper, paprika, lemon zest, lemon juice and olive oil. Whisk well. Rub the salmon thoroughly with the mixture on both sides. Place in a covered dish to marinade in the refrigerator for about 35 minutes.
3. Line a baking sheet with foil. Once the salmon has marinaded, place on the baking sheet and place in the oven to broil for 8 to 10 minutes, or until pale pink and flaky.

Roasted asparagus preparation

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1 bunch asparagus;
• 1 tbsp olive oil;
• 1/4 tsp sea salt;
• 1/4 tsp garlic powder;
• Freshly ground black pepper to taste;
• 1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice;

Preparation

1. Preheat your oven to 400 F.
2. Remove the tough part off of the asparagus stalks. Spread the asparagus out on a large baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and lemon juice. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Toss the asparagus to ensure it’s all evenly coated and cook for 10 minutes, flipping once after 5 minutes.

Cherry tomato salsa preparation

Serves 4

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup cherry tomatoes, quartered;
• 2 cloves garlic, minced;
• 1 tsp lemon zest;
• 1 tsp fresh lemon juice;
• 2 tbsp olive oil;
• 1/4 tsp sea salt;
• Freshly cracked black pepper to taste;
• 1/4 cup fresh oregano, chopped;

Preparation

1. In a small bowl, combine the garlic, lemon zest, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Whisk well. Add the cherry tomatoes. Toss the mixture together.
2. Serve over the salmon once it’s cooked.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

Register for my free newsletter and I’ll send you a free preview of the cookbook right away. Simply enter your email:

Many people love the Paleo food list because it gives them a quick overview of the wide range of food they can healthily enjoy on a Paleo diet. In spite of that, some people are still confused by what’s off limits and what exactly should be avoided to promote optimal health.

Here you’ll find a simple list of the foods and food categories to incorporate in your diet and those that you should be avoiding.

What to eat

• Meat;
• Fowl;
• Fish and seafood;
• Eggs;
• Vegetables;
• Green leafy vegetables;
• Root vegetables and tubers;
• Good fats (coconut oil, lard, tallow, olive oil, clarified butter, …);
• Fruits (with moderation);
• Nuts and seeds (with moderation);
• Herbs and spices;

What to avoid

• Refined sugar;
• Grains (Wheat, corn, oats,…);
• Legumes (soy, peanuts, lentils,…);
• Vegetable seed oils (corn oil, peanut oil, soybean oil);

Conclusion

I hope this simple list will help you quickly picture exactly what to include in your day to day food choices and what to keep off.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

Register for my free newsletter and I’ll send you a free preview of the cookbook right away. Simply enter your email:

If you already eat Paleo, you know advantages of eating the way you were built to eat; unsurprisingly, moving the way you were built to move has similar benefits. As well as preparing you to face the physical demands of an unpredictable world, exercise improves your immune system, lowers your risk of diabetes, osteoporosis, and stroke, promotes heart health, and increases longevity – and even more importantly, it keeps your body strong and your immune system functioning even as you age, so you can still enjoy your “golden years.” Getting regular exercise also improves your quality of life by reducing stress, preventing depression, improving memory, and helping you sleep better. Of course, let’s not forget about the fact that exercise is a great tool to develop a good looking, lean and muscular body. There’s nothing wrong in desiring and developing a sexy physique. The Paleo approach to fitness allows your body to reap all the rewards of physical activity, while avoiding the possible negative effects of forcing your body to move in ways it wasn’t designed for.

There is no one dogmatic approach or official Paleo fitness program. In general, the Paleo lifestyle emphasizes natural movement (preferably outside) over machine-based exercises and brief but intense strength training workouts over extended sessions of steady-state cardio. Too much cardio is the exercise equivalent of “healthy whole grains:” touted by the Department of Health, recommended by doctors everywhere, and damaging to your entire system. “Chronic cardio” keeps you in a constant “fight or flight” mode, increasing cortisol levels, inflammation, and damage to your cells from free radicals. On top of the increased stress from the exercise itself, the high-carb diet required to sustain chronic cardio harms your body in the long term by raising your insulin levels.

As well as discouraging an addiction to cardio, Paleo exercise programs stress the importance of rest and recovery time. Your workouts should leave you strong and energized, not constantly sore and exhausted, and exercise should never feel like a cruel form of torture you have to force yourself through. Fitness is important, but it should support your body, not dominate your life.

Within these broad guidelines, Paleo fitness is infinitely flexible and adaptable to individual needs – just like Paleo nutrition. The most important aspect of any exercise program is how well it works for you: experiment with any and all of the programs below until you discover what best fits your abilities and goals.

Natural movement

There were no elliptical trainers in the Paleolithic. While exercise machines fit conveniently into time-crunched modern schedules, they only work a narrow range of muscles and rarely mimic any movement you might need to do outside a gym. When you spend 30 minutes moving in a regimented, mechanical way and then sit for the next eight hours, you’re fundamentally disconnected from your body’s natural activity patterns.

Erwan Le Corre, founder of MovNat, refers to this disconnection as “zoo human syndrome.” To “rehabilitate” people stuck in unhealthy patterns of movement, the MovNat approach emphasizes the connection of mind and body as you re-learn 13 basic skills divided into three categories: manipulative (moving objects around), combatative (self-defense), and locomotive (moving yourself from place to place).

For anyone interested in learning more about their approach to fitness, MovNat offers various workshops – but you don’t have to go to a workshop to start working on your natural movement skills. Challenge yourself to a long hike, spend some quality time climbing around in a tree, or take a swing on the monkey bars at a local playground.

Overall Strength and Conditioning

CrossFit is probably the most popular overall fitness program in Paleo circles. Famously unspecialized, CrossFit builds overall fitness through workouts that incorporate bodyweight exercises and Olympic lifting into a program you can scale to meet your own fitness level. The vocabulary seems daunting (You did the WOD as Rx’d? What?), and the exercises might look impossibly difficult, but CrossFit is known for the individual attention paid to every member – you’ll get the coaching and encouragement to make it work for you. Take a look at the map of affiliates to find CrossFit gym in your area. CrossFit affiliates do charge much higher monthly fees than many commercial gyms, but if a membership is out of your budget, you can follow along at home. A Workout of the Day (WOD) is posted daily on the main CrossFit site, which also has a guide to getting started, and CrossFit’s video demos of all the exercises used in the WODs are a great resource even if you don’t follow the official program.

CrossFit workouts are known for intensity verging on insanity. If you’re not enthused by the thought of cranking out some of the crazier WODs and just want to stay fit and healthy, the Primal Blueprint Fitness program might be a better option. Mark Sisson refers to Primal Blueprint Fitness as “CrossFit for the rest of us” – a scalable, adaptable routine designed to complement the Primal diet. The basic components of Primal Blueprint Fitness are slow movement, compound lifting exercises and bodyweight training to build strength, and occasional sprinting and high intensity training. The program focuses on functional strength, discouraging “chronic cardio” and isolation exercises. Sisson also stresses the importance of moving your body through play: exercise shouldn’t be torturous! While it’s not for serious athletes, Primal Blueprint Fitness is a great basic Paleo fitness program that doesn’t require a burdensome time commitment or any fancy equipment.

Another workout program grounded in the Paleo diet is EPLifeFit (Everyday Paleo Life and Fitness), run by the same team as the blog Everyday Paleo. Sarah and Jason are strength and conditioning coaches, and John is a chiropractor – through EPLifeFit, they provide virtual assistance and support to clients at any level of fitness, without requiring a lot of expensive gym equipment. EPLifeFit posts daily workouts with instructions, and the forums let you connect with a community, ask questions, and even upload videos for Sarah and Jason to check your form.

More Paleo-friendly resources for overall fitness include the Nerd Fitness blog and the incredibly supportive and helpful community at the site’s forums (including one dedicated to the Paleo diet). Nerd Fitness focuses on bodyweight exercises and workouts you can take anywhere – Steve, the founder, maintains his exercise habits while he ranges around the world in search of adventure. Free resources on the site include a variety of different workouts, from a basic beginner bodyweight routine to the clever angry birds workout to rarer exercises like parkour.

Powerlifting

While programs like CrossFit, EPLifeFit, and Primal Blueprint Fitness focus more on overall conditioning, Stronglifts, Starting Strength, and Leangains are specifically designed to increase your strength and muscle mass through powerlifting. These programs all have three basic common features: they encourage compound lifts over isolation exercises, free weights over machines, and lifting heavier weights at fewer reps. Compound lifts build strength more efficiently than isolation exercises, by working more muscle groups with each exercise. Training with free weights is much more effective than spending hours on different types of machines, which don’t engage your stabilizer muscles and force your body into artificial positions; like MovNat, these powerlifting programs encourage you to use your entire natural range of motion to gain strength and avoid injury. Lifting relatively heavy weights at low reps is more useful for building strength than lifting low weights at high reps – Stronglifts, for example, specifies a 5×5 setup: 5 sets of 5 reps each.

Any strength training program’s website will display plenty of pictures of impressively muscular trainees, but you don’t already have to be a powerlifter to start building muscle: pick a program that works for your goals and start with whatever weight you can lift with good form. Don’t be discouraged if you have to start off by lifting 20 pounds: champion weightlifters weren’t born with barbells in hand, either! And if you need some equipment on a shoestring budget, check out DIY strength training gear for ideas.

Rest and recovery

All of the exercise programs outlined above emphasize the importance of rest. Mainstream exercise culture promotes the idea that the more hours you put in, the better – probably because so many people see exercise as a necessary evil that “allows” them to eat more calories. But the goal of Paleo fitness is not to burn as many calories as possible in an endless cycle of overeating and painfully increasing your time on the treadmill. All of the programs above incorporate rest days for a reason. When you do high intensity workouts, leave plenty of time for your muscles to recover, and don’t ignore signs of overtraining. More is not better!

Movement and lifestyle

Giving your body time to recover from a tough workout doesn’t mean lying on the couch watching TV when you’re not at the gym: the artificial dichotomy between intense, focused exercise (at the gym) and sitting still (for the rest of your day) is a modern construction that your body was not designed for. Paleo fitness means a sustained commitment to taking care of your body all the time – like the Paleo diet, Paleo fitness has no quick fix or easy way out. Slow movement should be a regular feature of your life, especially on your rest days from more strenuous activity. Plan movement into your routine: try using a standing desk or building regular stretches into your workday. Walking or biking instead of driving everywhere is also a practical way to work slow movement into your life.

Conclusion

As varied as the Paleo diet, Paleo exercise has the same basic goal: to improve your health by working with your body, not against it. Aside from general guidelines – focus on natural movement and consistent physical activity, emphasize briefer periods of high intensity work over endless cardio – Paleo fitness means whatever way of moving your body works best for you. The programs above are a great start: experiment with them, keep track of your results, and find a way of moving that fits into your life.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

Register for my free newsletter and I’ll send you a free preview of the cookbook right away. Simply enter your email:

It seems as though the seasons have been a little confused lately (at least where I’m from). We may just be skipping out on Spring this year and jumping right into Summer. I guess I shouldn’t really complain, as I could totally live without the rain. But then to think of what these odd temperatures will do to my garden.

It’s my first year planting all my herbs and vegetables from seed and I’ll be disappointed if mother nature is not on my side about that.

Anyway, I’ve decided to embrace the warmer temperatures and bring out all my favourite summer recipes earlier. This home-made lemonade tops the list! It’s the best drink to have on a scorcher, sitting pool side and soaking in the rays for some free vitamin D. It’s also great because it’s quite filling at the same time. Make sure you have very ripe and juicy strawberries on hand and rhubarb from your garden is always the best option. In fact, if you ever find yourself with too much rhubarb, chop it up and freeze it for later use. I still have leftovers from last summer in my freezer and I’m often adding it to smoothies.

This is officially the first recipe on the website where I use rhubarb, a weird, but fascinating plant. What’s consumed when eating rhubarb is the petiole, also called stalk. The leaves contain high levels of compounds that are toxic like oxalic acid and shouldn’t be consumed. The stalks are rarely consumed raw because of their very tart taste and the levels of oxalic acids that are still high, even though not nearly as high as in the leaves. In that sense, rhubarb stalks were probably not consumed very frequently by our ancestors, but then again, we shouldn’t be trying to blindly imitate them.

Many people are looking for more Paleo options for drinks and beverages other than smoothies, so this is definitely one great option. A very refreshing drink that’s perfect for very hot days and that kids will love even if it’s not loaded with refined sugar. It’s also loaded with vitamin C from all the fresh lemon juice so it’s a great immune booster.

Common lemonade recipes similar to this one often call for some added sugar, but this lemonade is sweet enough on its own from the lemon juice and strawberry that it doesn’t need the addition of any unhealthy sweetener.

Strawberry Rhubarb Lemonade Recipe

Serves 6

Ingredients

• 3 1/2 cups water;
• 1 lb rhubarb, chopped into 1 inch pieces;
• zest of 2 lemons;
• 3 cups fresh strawberries, halved;
• 1 1/2 cups freshly squeezed lemon juice;

Preparation

1. In a large pot combine the water, rhubarb and lemon zest. Allow it to come to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat and continue to simmer for approximately 15 minutes. At this point, add the strawberries and cook for another 2 to 3 minutes.
2. Remove the pot from the heat and allow it to cool completely. Once the mixture is at room temperature, use a hand blender to purée it all. When a smooth texture takes form, stir in the lemon juice. You may find you do not need all the lemon juice, so add it in portions until you feel it’s enough from the taste of it.
3. Place the lemonade in the refrigerator until very cold before serving.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

Register for my free newsletter and I’ll send you a free preview of the cookbook right away. Simply enter your email:

What is Intermittent Fasting?

Intermittent fasting, or IF, means incorporating regular periods of fasting into your meal schedule. Some people fast for 24 hours once or twice a week, while others incorporate shorter but more frequent fasts by restricting their daily caloric intake to a window of 4-8 hours. Fasting is most commonly understood to involve no food consumption at all, but Paul Jaminet at the Perfect Health Diet also argues for the consumption of coconut oil or bone broth during a fast.

Intermittent fasting is a logical extension of the Paleo diet, for people who want to eat not only what they evolved to digest, but when they evolved to digest it. Eating Paleo also makes fasting relatively easy: if you avoid refined carbohydrates, your energy levels don’t spike and crash with every meal, so you shouldn’t experience wooziness or “brain fog” during a fast.

Fasting and weight loss

Conventional diet wisdom discourages skipping meals, which is often associated with eating disorders and unsustainable crash diets. Deliberately practiced intermittent fasting, however, can be a powerful tool for weight loss.

Most obviously, fasting involves caloric restriction – and many people find it easier to fast than to count calories. When you fast, you quickly stop feeling hungry and can turn your attention to other things, and then conclude the fast with a satisfying meal. Counting calories, on the other hand, makes it easy to fixate on restricting food intake, leading to persistent feelings of hunger and deprivation as you eat several unsatisfying meals throughout the day.

Hormonal changes involved in fasting also promote weight loss, even if you don’t restrict calories. Fasting lowers the body’s levels of insulin, a hormone that prevents the release of stored body fat. With lower insulin levels, your body turns to stored fat for energy. Additionally, fasting increases other hormones called catecholamines, which trigger your body to use energy at a faster rate. This makes fasting a particularly useful tool for dieters, since it promotes the loss of fat rather than muscle mass.

Fasting and athletic performance

At first glance, athletic training in a fasted state seems contradictory: how can your body perform without fuel? But intermittent fasting can actually improve athletic performance, as long as you don’t fast for too long.

For endurance athletes, the benefits of fasting come from a two-pronged approach: training in the fasted state, and competing in the fed state. Fasted training can improve performance by forcing your body to adapt to lower glycogen stores and use glycogen more efficiently. Essentially, training in the fasted state adds another stressor, forcing your body to compensate and become stronger. This sets you up to get a huge boost from competing in the fed state – your body will make maximum use of your pre-workout fuel.

Short-term fasting is also useful for power athletes. While fasting for several days at a time will hurt your progress, intermittent fasts less than 24 hours will not cause muscle loss or send your body into “starvation mode,” as long as you consume adequate calories and protein when you do eat. On the contrary, when you lift in a fasted state, your body uses protein more efficiently afterwards, boosting muscle growth. Weightlifters seeking to gain lean mass without also gaining fat should look into Martin Berkhan’s Leangains program, which specifies an eight-hour “feeding window” and a sixteen-hour fast every day.

Other benefits of fasting

As well as weight loss and increased athletic performance, your body’s response to the beneficial stress of fasting can help promote health and longevity in a variety of other ways.

First, fasting can help cancer patients. Although the relevant research was conducted on animals, one study showed that rats who fasted every other day showed greater ability to fight off chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer, and improved heart health. Fasting helps fight these diseases because when you stress your cells by fasting, they enter “survival mode,” giving them increased resistance to stress, while cancer cells remain in “normal mode:” this gives your cells the advantage. In study on humans, scientists found that fasting can also reduce the risk of heart disease.

Fasting also promotes health by reducing oxidative stress. Oxidative stress, or damage to your cells from a harmful build-up of oxidized proteins, is linked to the harmful effects of aging. Fasting helps your cells get rid of these oxidized proteins. A study done on humans with asthma showed a reduction in oxidative stress and improved heart health on an alternate-day fasting regimen even when the “fasting days” actually involved very low food intake.

As well as benefitting your body, fasting is also good for your brain. In the same way that it helps your other cells, it increases brain cells’ ability to repair themselves and eliminate potentially harmful waste material. It also triggers the body to release more of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which supports healthy brain function and prevents degenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

On top of its other health benefits, intermittent fasting also helps some people who suffer from troublesome circadian rhythms, since circadian rhythms are even more strongly tied to eating patterns than to light exposure. Even if your circadian rhythms are normally fine, fasting can help beat jet lag by “resetting” your internal clock to the new time zone.

Who shouldn’t IF?

While most healthy adults following a Paleo diet should have no trouble with intermittent fasting, it’s not for everyone. Before adding IF to your routine, make sure your body has fully adjusted to eating Paleo. Fasting is a stressor to your body, so it can do more harm than good if you’re already under any kind of chronic stress. If you’re sleep-deprived, suffering the effects of overtraining or chronic lifestyle stress, leptin resistant, or if you have blood sugar problems, IF is not for you. You should not feel sick, dizzy, or inexplicably exhausted during a fast: if you do, eat something. Think of IF as the cherry on top of your Paleo chocolate pudding: first work on the fundamentals (adjusting to the dietary changes, getting enough sleep, and reducing chronic stressors), and then consider adding it to your routine.

Conclusion

If your body is able to handle the additional stress, intermittent fasting can lead to faster weight loss, improved athletic performance, and a long list of other health improvements. Easy to practice and safe for most people, IF can be a great addition to a Paleo diet.

P.S. Be sure to check out the Paleo Recipe Book. It’s a cookbook I’ve created to help you cook the best food for your health. It contains over 370 recipes and covers absolutely everything you need.

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