It was during one of the incredibly rare slow periods in my advertising career. I found myself with moments where I actually had time to think about life. Turns out I had a wife and kids (just kidding, sorta, if you’ve ever worked in the NYC rat race you’ll know how easy it is to forget about them!) Also turns out my wife said I was getting chubby. So I decided to ponder my health along with the spare tire and other junk accumulating in my trunk. I remembered a conversation I had with my older brother at least a decade prior where he casually mentioned that the smartest way to eat would probably be to emulate a caveman. He denies this ever happened. But I ran with it.
I googled “eating like a caveman”. Turns out there was a book :The Paleo Diet” by Dr. Loren Cordain. I dove in. The logic appealed to me. It seemed the most sensible way to approach diet I’d ever encountered. Essentially we bi-pedaled hominids (yep, I’m calling you a bi-pedaled hominid!) evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and during our long formative stages we ate only what the earth provided in an unprocessed form. Meat, veggies, leaves, berries, fruits, nuts, tubers and bugs for 99% of our existence. Mostly uncooked, but sometimes beautifully charred. It was only very recently in our evolutionary journey that we started eating processed, lab engineered, factory produced junk.
Now the fact that this Paleo book allowed diet soda scared me a bit but I overcame that minor detail and proceeded to follow the diet and lose 30lbs in the process. I also became a zealot. Like a soccer hooligan at an away game, I looked for vegan vs omnivore throwdowns. I scoffed at any offer of a lowly sugary treat. I was a dietary a-hole. But I kept researching. And experimenting and refining. I became less of an a-hole. Soon enough I found Mark’s Daily Apple, a very sensible site and approach to ancestral diet. Then I discovered The Perfect Health Diet by Paul Jaminet and Shou Ching Shih Jaminet. That book really resonated with me and made me wonder if the Paleo movement didn’t need to move a little more.
What perturbed me about Paleo at the time (it’s gotten waaaay better) was the need for the movement to establish inviolable rules. No Legumes under penalty of flogging!!! Death before grains!!! Meanwhile highly respected paleontologists refuted aspects of the paleo diet. And those folks know a wee bit about the subject. Clearly Paleo was on the right track but it was not perfect. What was great about Paleo IMHO was the elimination of the bad. Say goodbye to monocrop frankenfoods pseudo-oils and sugar bombs. That notion alone could change the developed world’s health condition dramatically. I began to accept that there were many healthy diet protocols with much in common. And those commonalities would be my bedrock. Ultimately I’ve settled on what I hope will be my life long ancestral based food experiment. I’ll base my diet on whole foods, mostly plants and meats, as well sourced as possible. But I’ll keep opening myself up to new additions to the diet. Because it’s fun and we have so much yet to learn.