Actually, I have many topics I'd like to say something about. The 'conundrum', as Alan Greenspan might say, is deciding where to begin when posting about nutrition, exercise, and fitness from the pre-agricultural ancestral point of view. Maybe a good place to begin would be how I came to be interested in this perspective in the first place.
The short version is, I was nearing obesity at a height of 6'2" and carrying around ~235 lbs. When taking into consideration that my left leg is amputated at the knee and I'm balancing on one foot on the bathroom scale, that's another 10 or 15 lbs that would have made the picture (hah!) worse. I was doing what we're told are all the right things though: eating a low fat diet, using "hearthealthy" (HH) 'vegetable' oils (actually plant seed oils); minimizing animal product intake; eating high carbohydrate foods, some factory-made but 'low fat', using lots of nutritional supplements... you get the picture. Pretty much the Standard American Diet (SAD). Sorry about all the abbreviations, but we'll need to use them over and over.
Since my dad and his sister both became Type 2 Diabetics -both eventually dying from the progression of its associated diseases- and my mom had died from sudden cardiac arrest, I knew I needed to make some big, effective changes. Thank goodness for the internet, coupled with a healthy dose of discernment and skepticism. Over a ten or twelve year period the information available has exploded and become better. Oh yeah, there is a ton of information out there, and sometimes it's hidden or too technical or draws unwarranted conclusions.
By finding and acting on what I believe is some of the best information "out there", my weight has dropped to ~200lbs (again, balancing on one foot), and I've gained strength and muscle mass, although at 70YO there ain't gonna be much more muscle being manufactured.
So that's how we got here. My goal is to find the gems in the fields of nutrition, fitness, archaeology, anthropology, physiology and more. Boil it down, distill its spirit, and share it in ordinary language so that anyone who's thirsty can drink. Bet you thought I was talking about something else for a second, didn't you.
One thing we'll keep in mind is, there is no one-size-fits-all. Each of us is a n=1 sample size.
That's all for this introductory post. We'll get to weightier things soon. Thanks for reading.
As we go forward, I hope everyone will feel welcome to participate by commenting freely.
And let's be cordial to one another, shall we?
