Obese Man Fasted For More Than A Year

In the 1960’s an obese man named Angus Barbieri had enough of his 456 pound frame and decided to do something about it. So under doctor supervision he undertook an endeavor I had no idea was physically possible. Angus didn’t eat food for 382 days. Nothing. He just stopped eating. And after some months, stopped pooping as well.

Angus just went about his life as normal, getting check ups regularly from his doctors and taking some vitamins. Over a year after his fast began, Angus had lost 276 pounds. Here are the before and after photos.

 

Is this Crazy?

Yes, a little. There have been reports of people who have gone on long fasting diets and have died. This is definitely something that needs to be done only under the supervision of a medical professional. But Angus isn’t the only one who has gone on very long fasts and seen amazing benefits. A reddit user claimed to have gone on a 77 day fast and lost 114 pounds. A quick search on YouTube brings up videos of people fasting for a month. Neither Angus nor the Reddit user gained the weight back either ( a common problem for dieters once they finish the diet). One can imagine that voluntarily completing a fast of some length will rid that person of any addiction they have towards food.

 

Fasting and Loose Skin

Many obese people who lose a lot of weight are left with an unattractive side effect. Loose skin. The fat is gone, but the skin has remained. Anecdotal reports of people who have fasted for a long time say that they have no problems with loose skin. Why does this happen? Dr. Jason Fung, who runs an obesity clinic, says that fasting catabolizes all that extra skin. Personally, I would love to see more data and a peer-reviewed study on this.

 

Should You Do It?

Obviously, a long-term fast is a serious undertaking and doctor supervision is absolutely necessary. It also requires great mental fortitude and willpower, although apparently it’s not as tough as you would imagine based on the reports of  those who have done it. They say that after 3-4 days you become used to it and there is a bit of a “hunter’s high”. A sense of focus that one could imagine is a result of our biology saying “hey we need to be super aware and functional now so that we can find food.”

If you are obese it may be worthwhile to do intermittent fasting. That is, to not eat for periods of 24-36 hours quite regularly. Once you conquer that challenge, try for 3 days or more. Good luck, and let me know how it goes!

Tom Brady and Gisele’s Diet — Pretty Paleo

An interview with Tom and Giselle’s chef at boston.com revealed their diet. Here is the chef in his own words.

Campbell: So, 80 percent of what they eat is vegetables. [I buy] the freshest vegetables. If it’s not organic, I don’t use it. And whole grains: brown rice, quinoa, millet, beans. The other 20 percent is lean meats: grass-fed organic steak, duck every now and then, and chicken. As for fish, I mostly cook wild salmon.

It’s very different than a traditional American diet. But if you just eat sugar and carbs—which a lot of people do—your body is so acidic, and that causes disease…Sugar is the death of people.

What ingredients don’t you use?

Campbell: No white sugar. No white flour. No MSG. I’ll use raw olive oil, but I never cook with olive oil. I only cook with coconut oil. Fats like canola oil turn into trans fats. … I use Himalayan pink salt as the sodium. I never use iodized salt.

[Tom] doesn’t eat nightshades, because they’re not anti-inflammatory. So no tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, or eggplants. Tomatoes trickle in every now and then, but just maybe once a month. I’m very cautious about tomatoes. They cause inflammation.

 

Other than the whole grains, they follow the strictest Paleo advice, including the ban on nightshades, which only the most hardcore Paleo eaters adhere to. They also stay away from coffee and dairy.

The Awakened Ape: The First Chapter

Here is the opening chapter to my book, The Awakened Ape: A Biohacker’s Guide to Evolutionary Fitness, Natural Ecstasy, and Stress-Free Living. Available on Amazon

awakeape
Introduction

The happiest people in the world don’t wear underwear. If they have clothes at all, it is either a simple sheath that covers their genitals or a cloth they wrap around their body in colder climates. They have almost no possessions. They don’t eat at restaurants, they don’t use smartphones, and they don’t watch television. They don’t have money. They don’t even know what money is. What they have is more valuable — a sense of serenity and self-confidence that would astound the average person. A joie-de-vivre, an easy laugh, and an absence of stress and worry. They love freely and have a deep sense of oneness with the earth.

They are also the healthiest people in the world. They know little, perhaps nothing, of cancer, heart disease, obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, allergies, diabetes or even poor eyesight. They have never been to a doctor. They are athletic, strong and muscular. They do not gain weight as they age or show signs of dementia. Most remarkable of all — for 95% of human history, this described the life of nearly every single human being on earth. Skeptical? It’s ok, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I might not have believed any of this either.

How can we most enjoy the brief moment of time we have to be alive? This question first struck me sometime during my formative years when the finiteness of life and certitude of death became palpable and utterly undeniable. A period of existential crisis took hold, and I became obsessed with finding a solution. I consulted everyone from the ancient Greeks to the most cutting-edge science in search of an answer, mixing and matching like an alchemist working on the philosopher’s stone. Take two parts psychology and anthropology, add a hefty portion of evolutionary biology and sprinkle with a dash of Eastern mysticism. Wash, rinse, repeat, until a dozen years later I have emerged with the concoction you now hold in your hands. This final elixir is not at all what I expected to find when I first set out on this journey. Many of the recommendations to follow will seem at best odd, and at worse sacrilegious, to ears molded in the technology driven consumerist milieu that is the modern world. But it is in embracing our primordial nature that the highest happiness is found.

Since the dawn of our existence up until the advent of agriculture, we scoured the earth from Africa to the Arctic in search of wild game and fresh fruits and vegetables. Along the way, the forces of natural selection attuned us to our environment in such a magnificent way that our hunter-gatherer ancestors felt a natural unity with their surroundings, leading to a life of robust health and merriment. There are tribes of people alive today, hidden in remote jungles of the Amazon and the sprawling Kalahari desert who still live in this ancient way and enjoy the fruits of life matched to its genetic potential. Most people in modern society look down upon these tribes as relics of the stone age. How unfortunate that they don’t have access to the wonders of technology! Yet the scientists who have lived among these ‘primitives’ describe them as the happiest and healthiest people they have ever seen.

The claims I have just made fly in the face of everything that we have been taught to believe and what is considered common sense. I majored in philosophy in college and much to the chagrin of the people unfortunate enough to sit across from me at dinner, I questioned and analyzed everything — from the color of the apples on the table to the most arcane theories in quantum physics. But it never dawned on me that things like stress, worry, and heart disease are modern illnesses. I took it as a given that as I grew older I would slowly lose my mind, my stressful life would cause my nervous system to degenerate, and I would eventually succumb to cancer. Then, while in graduate school and writing my master thesis on the evolutionary psychology of health and happiness, I began poring over the anthropological literature on hunter-gatherers. What I read blew my mind. I didn’t understand how this wasn’t public knowledge. I wanted to run out on the street and grab people by the collar, yelling what I was learning to their faces, “Did you know that hunter-gatherers don’t get cavities? Did you know this? They don’t even brush their teeth!” It is partly in the interests of not looking like a madman, and saving your nicely pressed Banana Republic button-down shirt that I have written this book instead.

Luckily in the last few years, the ancestral health movement, popularly depicted as “the paleo diet” has become hugely successful, and people around the world are thinner, stronger and suffer from fewer illnesses and chronic conditions as a result. A smashing success, and for those unfamiliar with the basics of paleo eating I have devoted a chapter to it. But in this craze to get healthier, thinner bodies, people consistently left out what I consider to be the far more interesting question. Why is it that hunter-gatherers were so happy? Why did they have such great mental health?

It may surprise you to know that psychologists began seriously studying happiness — the most important question in all of human existence — only at the turn of the new millennium. Before that psychologists were focused mainly on treating mental illness, taking a person from being sick to functioning normally. That is where all the money was; people don’t pay for a psychologist when they are simply feeling what Freud called “ordinary human unhappiness”. Since the question of how to make the most of this one and only existence we have on earth has been my driving motivation throughout my entire life and was the reason I studied existential philosophy as an undergrad, I was naturally intrigued by this new development in the field of psychology. I wanted to get my hands dirty. I decided to work in a positive psychology laboratory while pursuing my graduate degree in Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research. In the last decade, the field of positive psychology has blossomed with thousands of journal articles and seemingly as many books published on the subject. The modus operandi for studying happiness has been to take a sample from our modern society and figure out the personality, social, and economic correlations to well-being. Does money buy happiness? Yes, but only to the extent that one isn’t poor. After that it doesn’t matter much. People with lots of close friends tend to be pretty happy and those who are neurotic are not. A lot of this research has been insightful and overall a great boon to our understanding of the human condition. But when asking the question, “What is it that makes a person as happy as possible?” the field of positive psychology has come up short in six key areas. These are the issues I seek to address and clarify. They correspond to the six sections of this book. Let us begin.

The Meaning of Life

How strange a thing it is to be alive! This maelstrom of conscious experience, with its sensations of pleasure, pain, thought, and vision. How different it is to be human beings, rather than the rocks and oceans we share the planet with. How did it come to be so? Why do we feel what we feel? Why do we have the desires, likes and dislikes that we do? The average man is too busy, lost in a world of click-bait ads and Walmart aisles, ever to ponder such questions. The smarter, hard-working, type A’s among us, are too focused on achieving their dreams to question why they have those dreams in the first place. Only in the aftermath of heartache do we even pay lip service to these most important ideas.

That people can live their entire lives without knowing what it means to be a human being is a great misfortune. For without this philosophical foundation, we are liable to flitter away our short lives mired in needless dramas and pursuits. This section is about steering you on course, setting you in the direction of what is truly essential. Lest you worry that I am advocating for a life of pure asceticism or self-flagellation, or that one must devote oneself to some serious cause, I can assure you I am not. This is a book about pleasure and fun, about health and happiness. Through a series of thought experiments, I will argue the attainment of such well-being is the highest purpose to which one can aspire.

Unfortunately, there exists a cabal of contemporary psychologists who believe that any deliberate attempt to improve our happiness will only backfire. Trying to be happy they say, will only remind us of our unhappiness. Even such historical luminaries as John Stuart Mill, the philosopher most famous for espousing the view that pleasure was the greatest moral good, once said, “those are only happy who have their minds fixed on something other than their own happiness.”

As a biohacker, I never understood the affinity for these mysterian views of well-being. Biohacking is the principle that the human body is like a machine, and if we can figure out how it works, we can improve the way it functions. Happiness is not some nebulous ether, but a biophysical state that functions on the principle of cause and effect. In this way, it is similar to having a healthy heart. No doctor would advise his patient to “Stop trying to have a healthy heart if you want to have a healthy heart!”. And no psychologist should be telling anyone that happiness cannot be improved directly. If your attempts to improve your happiness are failing, it is not because it is impossible. It is because you are doing it wrong.

Happy Tribes

The majority of the research conducted on the happiest people on the planet has not been done by psychologists but by anthropologists. This happened completely by accident. When the field of anthropology exploded in the beginning of the 20th century, scientists had no idea that while traveling to the ends of the earth in search of lost tribes they would inadvertently be discovering the happiest people alive. They went out to study their social customs, their ways of gathering food, the tools they use and their sex habits. The study of their well-being was only ancillary, yet anthropologist after anthropologist would come out of the jungle remarking time and again how fit, confident, and relaxed their subjects were. The public found this hard to accept as the reigning belief was that history was a progressive march towards a better culture and way of life culminating in the apex of human existence that was modern European and American society. It doesn’t matter where you are, people around the world have an innate bias to assume that their culture is the best culture, and that everyone else in the world are poor saps who had the misfortune to be born in the wrong time and place. Unlike you.
Enamored with the stories of hunter-gatherers, I traveled deep within the Amazon rainforest to see these happy tribes with my own eyes. After two days of canoeing up the river and hiking through a dense thicket of vegetation, stepping over poisonous snakes and hearing the sounds of growling jaguars, I reached a community of hunter-gatherer’s called the Waorani. I found the women and children to laugh and giggle constantly. The men were stoic, self-confident and stress-free. The anthropologists had been telling the truth all along. I have sprinkled tales from my time with the Waorani throughout this book.

The Why of Happiness

From an evolutionary perspective, it is pretty easy to understand why nature makes an orgasm so pleasurable. For our genes to live on in their quest for immortality, they must make copies of themselves. To do this, the genes of the male must escape from the body they currently inhabit and find their way into the body of the female, at which point they will bond to form a new person programmed to carry their genes further on to the next generation. This bodily exchange of seminal fluid, the crux of what carries us forwards as a species, would seem an odd and perhaps repulsive pastime that no one would indulge in if Mother Nature hadn’t designed our brains to release pleasure-inducing hormones in the process. Our genes reward us for doing their bidding by making the behaviors that propagate our genes pleasurable. Sex is easy to understand. But why do we feel love, joy, enthusiasm, and serenity? Not all animal species feel these emotions. So why do humans? What evolutionary purpose do these emotions serve? And what kind of activities and what kind of society would allow us to feel these emotions more frequently?

The flip side of happiness is unhappiness, which results from negative emotions. The evolutionary purpose of fear and anxiety is pretty simple. It’s not a good thing for our genes to wind up in the belly of a ravenous beast. So we evolved a defense mechanism against large carnivorous predators that might want to eat us. See tiger. Feel fear. Run away. But for the vast majority of us today the most fearful predator we will ever come across is our neighbor’s fenced in German shepherd. So why is it that so many of us suffer from chronic stress, anxiety, and depression? Why is our stress response on constant alert when we have relatively little to be genuinely worried about? The answer to this will be found in the dramatic mismatch between our current lifestyle and the one in which our genes originally evolved.

Training the Mind

The benefits of mind training are so extraordinary that if I were to just come right out and tell you about them, you might think I had gone off the deep end, was a gullible fool, or worse, declare me a charlatan. To win you over to my way of thinking let me first present an analogy, a fictional scenario that has a moral you are already aware of: the benefit of exercise to one’s physique and health. What would it be like if someone from a society of people who had never exercised a day in their lives were to meet someone from a society where exercise was built into the very ethos of their community? A society in which, from a very young age, all of its members engaged in physical activities like running, jumping, throwing, wrestling and lifting weights. As adults, they would resemble our Olympic athletes. Now let’s say a member of this society — we will call him Achilles— is an adventurous type and travels across the ocean to a distant land where he meets the people who are unfamiliar with the concept of exercise. All the people in this society live a desk-bound existence, and suffer the resultant maladies caused by obesity. How would a conversation between Achilles and a man from this society go? I’d imagine that their exchange would be filled with puzzlement and wonder and unintentionally offensive statements, as meetings between people from distant cultures often are.

Upon pulling his boat up on the shore, Achilles is met by a dignitary from this foreign land of roly-poly’s named Mr. Rotund.

Mr. Rotund: Well hello there! …garbled chewing noises …Sorry, sorry, excuse me, I was just eating. tosses candy wrapper to the ground… How do you do? I am Mr. Rotund.

Achilles: Hi, my name is Achilles, and I have come all the way from across the sea to observe what kind of people there are in this part of the world.

Mr. Rotund: Achilles! Ah, well that explains it.

Achilles: Explains what?

Mr. Rotund: You are Achilles! You have the muscular body of the Greek Gods we have statues of in our museums. You are only half human, your mother was a Goddess, which is where you must get that incredible physique from!

Achilles: Why thank you, but that is a silly legend. I assure you that I have two fully human parents, and there is nothing spectacular about my physique as this is what all humans look like. What I have never seen is a creature like you before. In our culture it is only the women that have protruding mammaries.

Mr. Rotund: Do you mean to tell me that you have no obesity in your society? Huffing and puffing as he waddles through the sand. That people from your society do not get diabetes and die early from heart attacks? Hold on..let us slow down the pace. I am getting winded. That they don’t have hypertension, strokes or keep their shirts on while swimming in the pool?

Achilles: Obesity? Diabetes, stroke? I have never heard of these things. Are these diseases you get due to your immense lardness?

Mr. Rotund: Yes! They are terrible conditions.

Achilles: Mr. Rotund, my friend, I do not understand. Why would you ever let your body get like this?

Returning from our imaginary meeting let me propose the following: Achilles, as depicted in our story, could very well have been one of our paleolithic ancestors. Anthropologist Jared Diamond has remarked that the hunter-gatherers he has visited have physiques that resemble miniature bodybuilders. And they don’t go to the gym! Their low fat, muscular physiques are the result of living and eating the way a wild human animal is supposed to. They move frequently, walk long distances daily, often while lugging heavy buckets of water or a large antelope leg on their shoulders. Do this every day of your life and you are going to look like an underwear model.
Contemporary life is spent sitting in chairs. As a the result of this sedentary lifestyle, we watch our bodies generate excess blubber around our midsections until the once beautiful, strong and powerful apes that we started out as, are hardly recognizable. For those of us less inclined to develop a pear-shaped corpulence, we use a technique to stimulate muscle growth and improve our cardiovascular system. We call this exercise. Modern life is so far removed from the way our natural bodies are supposed to move that without the intervention of regular exercise our physical health will rapidly deteriorate.

Now here is the important point — just as our physical health will decline from the sedentary lifestyle we have adopted in the modern world, our mental health is in equal peril from this unnatural environment we find ourselves in. The inability to pay attention, stress, worry, depression and anxiety are the mental equivalents of diabetes, stroke, and hypertension. Hunter-gatherers do not get any of these modern diseases, mental or physical.

Unlike Mr. Rotund, those of us in the modern world are lucky enough to live in a society where the benefits of physical exercise and sport were discovered long before the computer and car, and so along with a good diet we have ways to combat our poor physical health. But what about our mental health? Are there exercises to combat everyday stress and worry? If so, how often do we perform them? Are we mental Mr. Rotund’s, unaware that there is a treatment that would prevent us from getting these common maladies of the mind? Are we resigned to the idea that stress, worry, and low self-esteem are inevitable features of the human condition for which we can do little about? What would happen if we were to meet a society of people trained from a young age in the art of mental exercise, who grew to possess such great mental strength that some of us might be fooled into thinking they were divine? And what if I were to tell you that this has already happened?

One of the many hippies to travel to Tibet in the 70’s was a young Californian by the name of Alan Wallace. He had become fed up with western culture, but fascinated by Buddhism. He wanted to learn how to meditate at the feet of the greatest masters in the world and became a monk in a Himalayan monastery. It was there that his ideas of mental health were completely turned upside down.

The abbot of the monastery was giving a talk to the monks about a common psychological problem amongst Tibetans. He lamented that people have a tendency to think very highly of themselves while putting others down. At the end of the talk, Alan stood up and said, “My problem is not that I have too much pride, but that I often think negatively of myself. I often don’t like myself and don’t think I am very good.” The abbot glanced up at Alan with a sweet expression, smiled and said, “No you don’t.” The abbot didn’t believe him. He had never heard of the concept of someone not liking themselves before.

Similarly in a meeting between the Dalai Lama and American psychologists in 1990, one of the psychologists brought up the concept of negative self-talk. Since there are no words in Tibetan that translate into low self-esteem and self-contempt, it took quite a long time for the psychologists to convey what they meant. But this wasn’t a translation problem. It was a problem of conceptualization. Self-loathing? People do that? The Dalai Lama was incredulous. Once the Dalai Lama understood what they were saying, he turned to the Tibetan monks in the room, and after explaining what the psychologists were talking about, he asked, “How many of you have experienced this low-self esteem, self-contempt or self-loathing?”

Complete silence.

Here was a psychological state of mind so ubiquitous in our culture, that everyone experiences it from time to time, if not every single day. Yet these Tibetans, trained since childhood in the art of a mental exercise they call meditation, acted like they were being told about some alien life form. The Dalai Lama turned back to the psychologists and asked, “Why would you ever let your mind get like this?”

The Nature of Reality

The final and most esoteric aspect of happiness that is left out of all those positive psychology books is talk about a deeper nature of reality. Philosophers on the other hand, have opined on this subject since the very beginning. The man who coined the term philosopher, meaning “lover of wisdom” was Pythagoras, who intertwined his philosophy into a worldview and way of life that only members of his secret sect were privy to. Concrete facts about Pythagoras’ life are few, as there are no surviving biographical sources from his contemporaries. What information we do have was written down many years later and presents Pythagoras as a nearly divine figure, saying he emanated a supernatural glow. Did he know secrets of the cosmos that have been lost to us today? Unfortunately, we will never know as Pythagoras beliefs died with him and his followers millennia ago. What we do know is that his society practiced communalism, had no personal possessions, followed a strict diet, adhered to an ethical code of honesty, selflessness, and mutual friendship. Advice very similar to what you will find in this book. While the wisdom of the Pythagoras has been buried by the sands of time, the teachings of an even more luminous figure from the ancient world remain. The teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, more commonly known as the Buddha, which means “the awakened one.”

What is it that he woke up to? Buddhist philosophy states that in our everyday lives we are overcome by delusion, which creates attachment and aversion and traps us in a cycle of suffering. By waking up from this delusion, we attain nirvana. Nirvana literally means ‘blowing out,’ as in a candle flame. It is by blowing out the flames of attachment, aversion, and ignorance that suffering is extinguished. The result is a mind that experiences sublime peace.

Does this sound too good to be true? As scientists we will examine Buddhism from a secular perspective, focusing on the pragmatic teachings related to ending suffering and increasing happiness while ignoring the dubious religious elements like reincarnation. How does this secular Buddhism stack up to the demands of modern science? Is there truly a reality hidden beneath our eyes that would lead us to extraordinary well-being if we could only see? Is nirvana the highest happiness a human  could possibly experience? Do people actually attain it? Or at the very least, do they get close? How far along the path can we reasonably expect to get? These questions will be the focus of the second half of this book.

Integration

The Buddhist term ‘bodhi’ is often translated in English as enlightenment or awakening. Bodhi refers to a special kind of knowledge, that of the causal mechanisms that lead to human suffering. Our aim here is the same, to fully understand the causes and conditions that lead to suffering and happiness bolstered by the latest revelations in contemporary science. This book seeks to integrate two separate traditions of ancient wisdom with modern science so that we can live the happiest and healthiest lives possible. By learning about the environment in which our Paleolithic ancestors evolved and how our genetics are still wired to that way of life, we can begin to organize the outer conditions (the diet we need to eat, the exercise we need to do, the sunlight we need to get and the social relationships we need to build and maintain, etc) that will give us the best chance to flourish both physically and mentally. From there we will add the most successful techniques ever developed by humans to work on the inner conditions (our ability to relax, focus, and experience states of ecstasy and compassion, etc) of our mental lives — that of Buddhist soteriology.

This book is also about integrating what we learn into our daily existence in a modern world. Obviously we can’t all live like hunter-gatherers in the Amazon or Buddhist monks in the Himalayas; We have jobs, families and responsibilities. Within the pages of this book, you will find tips on how to live in a more natural way while still waking up every weekday morning to brave the congested commute on your way to the office. As you make changes to your diet, begin a meditation practice and stop using shampoo (read on), you will gradually notice a sense of calm and mental balance replacing the stressed out habitual thought patterns that previously occupied your mind. Your waist will narrow, your sense of vitality will increase, and even things like the common cold will be a rare occurrence.

I assume most people will take their practice only this far. That is fine. There’s a lot to be said for being happy, calm and healthy. But for those who feel the calling to make the best of their time on earth and reach the highest peaks possible, this book is also a guide that will point you in the right direction. Follow this path and you may find that one day the world around you has become a dancing, playful thing, filled with a previously unimaginable serenity and bliss.

The “I’m Naturally Fat” Myth

“It takes a lot of work for me to lose weight”

“I’m a big person. If I just live normally, I gain weight. I have to be super strict with my diet and exercise if I want to be thin.”

“As soon as I stop eating healthy and exercising, I balloon up”

“It’s my genetics, I’m naturally fat”

I can’t tell you how many times I have heard these excuses, and if you are an overweight person, be honest — how often have you said these things yourself?

But it’s not true. No one is naturally fat.

Your ancestors were all fit, strong, athletic apes. And you too have the genetics of a fit, strong, athletic ape. The problem is that you live so unnaturally now. You have actually had to work really hard to destroy your genetic potential. It has taken you a lifetime of eating a diet of sugary, processed foods, drinking soda, and being a couch potato to become fat and out of shape.

At the turn of the 20th century only 1 in 150 people were obese. Now 35% of Americans over the age of 20 are obese, and the number is skyrocketing. The problem is environmental, not genetic. The human genome has not undergone such dramatic change in only a few generations that nearly half of us now have the ‘obese gene’. In hunter-gatherer societies, not only is there no obesity, there is nobody who is overweight. Everyone is fit and in shape. That’s how humans are supposed to be. That’s how humans naturally are. That’s how you naturally are.

The good news is that your genetic potential to be fit and good looking is so strong, that just by returning to a natural diet and exercise lifestyle, you will lose weight fast and dramatically. Your body wants so badly to be healthy and fit, that it only takes months (or at most a couple of years for the hugely obese) to get back in top shape, despite all the bad habits you have picked up over your entire lifetime.

Stop thinking of eating a healthy diet and exercising as hard work. It’s not. It takes no more effort to pick up the healthy food item at the grocery store than it is to pick up processed trash. It doesn’t take any more effort to order the steak and veggies at the restaurant than it does to order the pizza. Exercise isn’t work, it’s fun. Your body wants to move. It will reward you with feel good hormones when you get your heart pumping. To sit on the couch all day is to fight against your genetics. Your body will make you lethargic and depressed as punishment for this laziness.

It is much easier to be fit and healthy than it is to be fat and out of shape. To be fit and healthy all you have to do is live naturally. To be fat and out of shape, you have to stuff yourself with processed junk and fight your body’s natural desires to get up and move. Stop trying so hard to be fat.

 

 

Are Toilets Bad For You?

I awoke to the sounds of birds and crickets as the morning sunbeams creeped through the canvas fibers of my sleeping tent. I unzipped the semicircle opening and stepped out to embrace the rarified air. I yawned and stretched out to my full height, taking in the endless sea of conifers and mountain ridges spread out in every direction from our 8500 foot perch overlooking Lake Tahoe. The radiance of the moment only interrupted by the rumbling in my belly caused by last night’s canned dinner. But do not despair, for these grumblings portended a new opportunity! A chance to conquer a necessary right of passage into adulthood, to help squander my ceaseless adolescence that dogged me well into my mid-twenties. To engage in a ritual that connected a primal part of my being to all other life on the planet.

It was time to take a shit in the woods.

Once upon a time this was the only way to relieve yourself, before the modern invention of the outhouse, and eventually the home toilet. We now hide ourselves alone in a room, sit down and empty our bowels in total seclusion. We flush away the remnants, never to be seen again. This is the dignified way to do it right? Not like a pathetic animal, leaving our turds in the cold, hard ground. Alas friends, never underestimate the insularity of mind that goes by the pretense of being ‘civilized’.

Yet as I walked away from the tent in search of a pristine spot to lay my droppings, I began to grow a bit trepidatious. My callowness in the art of shitting au natural began to froth in the form of apprehensive thoughts. I just squat all the way down right? Will my legs get tired? What if someone sees me? I mean, I walked deep into the woods to make sure no one would come near, but someone could walk past. How awkward would that be? Here I am squatting down, taking a dump and someone could just walk right past me out here in the open wilderness!

Fuck it. I’m going for it. I squatted all the way down. My fear that this might be a long bowel movement was quickly alleviated. With the angle of my body in a full squat, it came out quick, fast and clean. I had never had such a pristine expulsion of feces.

I looked around the mountain top where I squat, the beautiful sunshine lit my face, the songs of the birds danced on the waves of crisp air. I felt free. Then it hit me. A thought so profound I had to tell someone at once! I rushed back to the campsite (well..after digging a small hole and burying my toilet paper of course) where my friends were. They were packing for the day’s hike. I interrupted them.

“It’s all a scam!” I yelled.

“What? What are you talking about? What’s a scam?”

“Toilets.”

Toilets, ladies and gentleman, are bad for you.

Here in the western world we think of the elevated toilet, where we sit with our legs at a 90 degree angle as the only way to take a dump. It may shock you to know that the majority of the world uses the squat toilet instead.  A squat toilet is basically a hole in the ground, that in developed countries that use it will also flush in the same manner as our toilets. It is not only more natural, but a quicker and healthier way to take a shit. Scientific studies have shown this.

In a paper published in the Journal of Medical Hypothesis hilariously titled “Cardio-vascular events at defecation: are they unavoidable?” The angle of the sitting position is said to be obstructive which causes the defecating human to try and force out the crap with multiple excessive pushes that tax the cardiovascular system. While it may seem ridiculous, dying of a heart attack on the toilet is a common cause of death amongst the elderly. Dr. Berko Sikirov, the leading researcher in this field also says the sitting position is three times more strenuous than the squatting position and can lead to hemorrhoids and colonic diverticulosis.

For those of us in relatively good health, there are other benefits of the squatting position. Mostly that is is faster and smoother. Dr. Sikirov did another study where he timed how long people shitted for in both the squatting and sitting position. By his calculations the average time spent shitting for squatters was 51 seconds, the fastest being a 21 year old female who over a six shit sample averaged only five seconds per dump. While for those sitting at the average toilet height it was 2 minutes and 10 seconds. Anecdotally I can confirm these results and add that the most time gained is in the act of cleaning up. When squatting the feces comes out so smoothly that you hardly have to wipe!

If you have grown up in the western world and don’t feel like renovating your entire bathroom to put in a squat toilet it’s ok. There are other options. There are awkward contraptions that you can place around your toilet which you can stand on and squat, but the most practical option is to get a stool that you put your feet up on. A popular brand out there is called Squatty Potty .While you won’t be able to get into the full squat position, it is still way better than your normal sitting posture. From personal experience the simple tool will make the process of emptying your bowels more enjoyable, is healthier and will save you lots of time.

Deconstructing Scientific American’s Anti-Paleo Article

Yesterday science writer Ferris Jabr posted an article on the Scientific American website called How to Really Eat Like a Hunther-Gatherer: Why the Paleo Diet is Half Baked.  Some of his gripes with paleo are accurate, but not unknown to paleo afficiandos and others are simply not well thought out. I’ll go through them here one by one.

 

 

Diet has been an important part of our evolution—as it is for every species—and we have inherited many adaptations from our Paleo predecessors. Understanding how we evolved could, in principle, help us make smarter dietary choices today. But the logic behind the Paleo diet fails in several ways: by making apotheosis of one particular slice of our evolutionary history; by insisting that we are biologically identical to stone age humans; and by denying the benefits of some of our more modern methods of eating.

On his website, Sisson writes that “while the world has changed in innumerable ways in the last 10,000 years (for better and worse), the human genome has changed very little and thus only thrives under similar conditions.” This is simply not true. In fact, this reasoning misconstrues how evolution works. If humans and other organisms could only thrive in circumstances similar to the ones their predecessors lived in, life would not have lasted very long.

 

There is a difference between ‘surviving’ and ‘thriving’. In terms of health and happiness I would not consider the majority of the human race today to be thriving. Obesity is skyrocketing, mental illness is everywhere and even those considered to be of normal psyche’s are far more stressed out than your hunter-gatherer’s – who really do exhibit a remarkable lack of stress and worry.  And while species do need to be able to survive new environments; and while we have evolved slightly since the paleolithic era, our genes have changed no where near as fast as our culture has. If you took a person from 20,000 years ago, gave him a haircut and dressed him in clothes from your local mall he would be indistinguishable from the other shoppers, albeit in better shape. However, that mall and everything inside placed next to a paleolithic village of huts would seem like from another planet. We are simply not adapted to live sedentary lifestyles, indoors and munching on the Western diet.

Even if eating only foods available to hunter–gatherers in the Paleolithic made sense, it would be impossible. As Christina Warinner of the University of Zurich emphasizes in her 2012 TED talk, just about every single species commonly consumed today—whether a fruit, vegetable or animal—is drastically different from its Paleolithic predecessor.

This critique of modern paleo diets is true. Although none of this is new to the paleo community. As Fabr himself writes, people who follow a paleo diet try and mimic the ones of their ancestors as best as we can.

But where Fabr really gets into trouble is when he starts talking about our ancestors and their health. He writes..

 

[ The Paleo Diet ] ignores much of the evidence about our ancestors’ health during their—often brief—individual life spans (even if a minority of our Paleo ancestors made it into their 40s or beyond, many children likely died before age 15

 

Fabr needs to do a little more research into the lifespan of hunter-gatherer’s.  Perhaps he is unaware of this study entitled

Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination that found the modal age of death in extant hunter-gatherer tribes to be 72. While it is true that childhood mortality is much higher (which significantly brings down the mean age of death) in these cultures the reason for their early deaths has nothing to do with diet.  It is believed that somewhere between 15%-50% all young babies died from infanticide. Many other’s during childbirth.  Infant mortality in hunter-gatherer tribes was 30 times higher than in modern society and childhood mortality 100 times higher. The reason for these high rates is the natural dangers of living in the wild and living in a world without modern medicine. Ask yourself, would you have made it out of childhood if you had never seen a doctor?  I know that I had a terrible case of pneumonia at age 2, and whose to say without the help of modern medicine that I would have survived.

We can look at the chart of the actual deaths of members of the Hiwi tribe, the tribe that Jabr references and see exactly what it is that killed them.  Most interesting is the data collected from pre-contact times as that would be the most telling of a natural hunter-gatherer tribe. Although it should also be mentioned that the Hiwi have a higher rate of mortality, especially from warfare as in comparison to other extant hunter-gatherer tribes.

Of the 169 total deaths recorded, here is why they died.

Infectious disease (Malaria, respiratory infection, diarrhea, measles)= 70

War (with each other or Venezuelans) = 33

Infanticide=13

Congenital infant death (birth trauma and other childbirth deaths)=12

Environmental Hazard=7

Human Caused Accident=7

Suicide=3

Organic and pathological conditions (heart problems, cancer, liver problems, “swallowed tongue”) = 1

Nutritional deficiencies (starvation or malnourished)=0

Jabr used the Hiwi as an example of anti-paleo but looking at their mortality rate it looks like a glaring win for those who choose to eat a Paleo Diet.  Only one single Hiwi died from a pathological condition(the most common form of death in the US) and considering that “swallowed tongue” was even considered in the category by the researcher’s that could very well have been the reason for that death. While 0 of the Hiwi tribe died from either nutritional deficiencies or starvation. This means that the diet of the Hiwi was certainly not giving them cancer and heart disease. Where does this leave Jabr’s argument? Basically “Lots of Hiwi died from malaria, therefore you should eat pancakes.”

 

recent study in The Lancet looked for signs of atherosclerosis—arteries clogged with cholesterol and fats—in more than one hundred ancient mummies from societies of farmers, foragers and hunter–gatherers around the world, including Egypt, Peru, the southwestern U.S and the Aleutian Islands. “A common assumption is that atherosclerosis is predominately lifestyle-related, and that if modern human beings could emulate preindustrial or even preagricultural lifestyles, that atherosclerosis, or least its clinical manifestations, would be avoided,” the researchers wrote. But they found evidence of probable or definite atherosclerosis in 47 of 137 mummies from each of the different geographical regions.

 

Dr. Stephen Guyanet breaks down this study and what we can draw from these conclusions excellently here. Most importantly he writes that developing atherosclerosis does not equate to having a heart attack. Atherosclerosis may just be something that happens as we age and while it is a risk factor for heart attack, numerous studies of non-industrial cultures have shown them to have atherosclerosis and yet have almost zero incidence of heart attack. It should also be noted that only 6 of the mummies came from a hunter-gatherer culture (what an incredible sample size!) and these hunter-gatherer’s were from the artic, and had to adopt a very extreme diet out of necessity with almost no plant food. In other words, these are not your average hunter-gatherer’s- most of whom lived in more moderate climates.

 

And even if heart disease, cancer, obesity and diabetes were not as common among our predecessors, they still faced numerous threats to their health that modern sanitation and medicine have rendered negligible for people in industrialized nations, such as infestations of parasites and certain lethal bacterial and viral infections.

Actually many of the viruses that humans have fell to over the years came from animals that we were breeding. Hunter-gatherer cultures existed largely without these deadly viruses and hence had no immune system response to them when the white man came and devastated their populations with small pox and other diseases.  Certain hunter-gatherer tribes never even got the common cold. While it is true parasites and bacterial infections were a problem, what does it have to do with modern people eating a diet based on our paleolithic ancestor’s? Absolutely nothing.

 

If we compare the diets of so-called modern hunter-gatherers, however, we see just how difficult it is to find meaningful commonalities and extract useful dietary guidelines from their disparate lives (see infographic). Which hunter–gatherer tribe are we supposed to mimic, exactly? How do we reconcile the Inuit diet—mostly the flesh of sea mammals—with the more varied plant and land animal diet of the Hadza or !Kung? Chucking the many different hunter–gather diets into a blender to come up with some kind of quintessential smoothie is a little ridiculous.

 

Here’s the thing about modern day hunter-gatherer tribes. They have been pushed to the ends of the earth by agriculture societies, and now only exist in the harshest of places. Places where most people have no desire to live. The Hadza and !kung live in sweltering heat of Africa, the Inuit in the freezing cold of the Artic and the Hiwi deep with the jungle of the Amazon where malaria runs amok and all sorts of other things large and small that want to kill you. Yes their diets are extremely different, but that is out of necessity of where they live and what is available to them. The vast majority of our hunter-gatherer ancestors would not have lived in such dramatic conditions and have far more variety and food available to them.

Even as diverse as the diets of the Inuit and the !Kung, they do have some commonalities. Neither of those tribes eats bread, pasta, pizza, cookies, or drink coco-cola. As Jabr himself admits, “The [paleo] diet is largely defined by what they do not do”

 

Meet Grok. According to his online profile, he is a tall, lean, ripped and agile 30-year-old. By every measure, Grok is in superb health: low blood pressure; no inflammation; ideal levels of insulin, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides. He and his family eat really healthy, too. They gather wild seeds, grasses, and nuts; seasonal vegetables; roots and berries. They hunt and fish their own meat. Between foraging, building sturdy shelters from natural materials, collecting firewood and fending off dangerous predators far larger than himself, Grok’s life is strenuous, perilous and physically demanding. Yet, somehow, he is a stress-free dude who always manages to get enough sleep and finds the time to enjoy moments of tranquility beside gurgling creeks. He is perfectly suited to his environment in every way. He is totally Zen…..

..In contrast to Grok, neither Paleo hunter–gatherers nor our more recent predecessors were sculpted Adonises immune to all disease….Drop Grok into the Hiwi’s midst—or indeed among any modern or ancient hunter–gather society—and he would be a complete aberration. Grok cannot teach us how to live or eat; he never existed

 

Oh really.. Let us check out a few descriptions of hunter-gatherer’s who don’t live in such extreme conditions of the Hiwi. Here is Weston Price’s description of the Torres Straight Islander’s:

It would be difficult to find a more happy and contented people than the primitives in the Torres Straight Islands as they lived without contact with modern civilization.  Indeed, they seem to resent very acutely the modern intrusion. They not only have perfect bodies, but an associated personality and character with a high degree of excellence. One is continually impressed with happiness, peace and health while in their congenial presence (p.187).

 

Or what was said about the people of the Marquesas Islands by the early navigator’s..

The people of the Marquesas Islands were enthusiastically extolled for their beauty and excellence of physical development by the early navigators…They reported the Marquesans as vivacious, happy people…The early navigators were so impressed with the beauty and health of these people that they reported the Marquesas Islands as the Garden of Eden (p.116).

 

While you can find pictures of clearly underfed hunter-gatherer’s living today in extreme conditions of Africa, when we look at pictures of hunter-gatherer’s before they were kicked to the ends of the earth we do find Adonis looking figures. Check out these Australian Aborigines

 

 

Here is another picture…Do you see how well built these guys are? Especially the one on the far left and the far right? This is about as perfect as you can get. And these guys don’t go to the gym or drink protein shakes!

 

 

In case you are thinking it is just the aborigines..it’s not. Here are the Waoroni Indians of Ecuador. Studies on them when they were first discovered showed them to be totally absent of hypertension, heart disease, cancer, anemia, the common cold, polio, pneumonia, small pox, chicken pox, typhus, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria or serum hepatitis

 

 

Or we can take a look at the Asaro mudmen of Papua New Guinea. Horticulturists who eat similarly to modern day paleo dieter’s. Eating sweet potato’s and fruits from their garden and meat from livestock.

 

Over on twitter, Ferris Jabr proclaimed that he “sees no legitimate reason for prohibiting grains, dairy or legumes”

Well I’m going to give him a few. They aren’t optimally nutritious, and they have immunogenic and allergenic properties in their proteins. They also have higher food palatability and reward which causes you to eat more than you should. Dr. Mattieu Lalonde who got his Ph.D on organic chemistry from Harvard gave a great speach at the Ancestral Health Symposium in 2012 on just why you shouldn’t eat these foods. He is a very smart guy and this is well worth watching. Grains especially don’t come out too well. Legumes fair better and dairy does fine. If you are one of those people who can handle dairy I’m all for it, but many are not. And even Jabr arch-nemesis Mark Sisson says that legumes are ‘ok’. Although people should still be concerned about their phytic acid content, which stops you from absorbing a lot of the nutrients present in legumes. Meaning legumes probably aren’t as nutritious as their content contains. They are also high in lectins which are potentially toxic and can lead to autoimmune problems.

But the answer on grains is clear. If you are looking for the optimal diet, why would you make grains a staple of your diet when they simply aren’t as nutritious as meat and vegetables? Especially grains in their modern form. And the reason they are not as nutritious to our bodies has nothing to do with chance, it is because we did not evolve to eat them over millions of years. These are a relatively new food group to our species. Paleo logic, and it is backed up by nutritional data.

Ferris Jabr says that people like Mark Sisson and other paleo folk don’t understand evolution and science, but I think this post shows that he is the one who has it backwards. After all, Mark Sisson is 60, follows the paleo diet and lifestyle as best he can and has the body of a 20-something UFC fighter.

 

 

Ferris Jabr is a 20-something year old who thinks Mark Sisson’s lifestyle is illogical and has a body similar to Screech.

 

 

The Surprising Correlation Between Cholesterol and Heart Disease – It’s Not What You Think

There is a lot of confusion about cholesterol levels and human health.

Is your Dr. recommended level of total serum cholesterol under 200 justified?

What would the ideal total cholesterol level be for your health? Here is an interesting graph I came across. It measures cholesterol levels and mortality rates from 164 countries around the world. There are some surprising results. It seems that the *ideal* total cholesterol level is higher than what doctors recommend. By ideal I mean it has the smallest correlation to heart disease and overall mortality.

  • Those with a total cholesterol level of 208 were the least likely to die from heart disease. About 220 deaths per 100,000 people.
  • People with a cholesterol level of 150 accounted for 600 deaths from heart disease per 100,000. Meaning those with total cholesterol level of 150 were nearly 3x as likely to die from heart disease than those with cholesterol levels just over 200.
  • Only when cholesterol levels go above 244 do we find that high cholesterol is worse than having a cholesterol level of 150.
  • The ideal cholesterol level to have for not dying of any reason, not just heart disease is 223. But this is largely to a dramatic decrease in infectious and parasitic diseases.
  • My father recently cut down on red meat, and egg yolks and his total cholesterol dropped from 201 to 165. The popular thinking on this is that he just did a great thing for his heart. Yet according to this graph he just doubled his chance of dying from heart disease!

 

Is this result replicated in other studies? Apparently yes. In a study done by the Japanese they found that patients with total cholesterol levels between 200-219 were the least likely to die. The optimal LDL level was considered between 120-139.  A standard lipid profile you get during a routine check up will tell you that having a LDL level of under 130 and a total cholesterol level of under 200 is ideal, but that doesn’t seem to mesh with this data.

According to these results my fathers total cholesterol drop from 201 to 165 increased his risk of mortality by 72%. And his lowering of his LDL from 138 to 101 increased his rate of mortality 20%.

In Conclusion: These are only a few studies, and I am sure there are probably other studies with different results.  But at the very least one has to wonder whether or not the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease is really as scary as people make it out to be. There in fact have been a plethora of books on the subject lately that argue that relationship between cholesterol and heart disease is a myth. I’ll tell you one thing, my total cholesterol level at my last check up was 212, and I’m definitely not worried about. It may even be ideal.

 

 

 

Joe Rogan’s Green Smoothie

Joe Rogan likes to start his day by making a green smoothie. It’s paleo friendly and a great way to start the day.

 

Here are the ingredients

  • Cucumber
  • Celery
  • Ginger
  • Kale
  • Pear

 

Directions

1. Chop up cucumber, place in blender

2. Slice up pear, place in blender

3. Blend

4. Add Kale and blend

5. Add celery and ginger

6.Blend

7. Drink!

 

Here’s a video of the very powerful Joe Rogan making his famous smoothie

 

 

 

 

3 Quick Tips to Make Eating Paleo Easy For Lazy People

I get a lot of people asking me, “Is the paleo diet hard to follow?” or “I’m pretty lazy and don’t cook much, how can I make eating paleo easy? Below are my three favorite techniques for making things super easy for us lazy folks.

1.Eat the same meals over and over again until you get the hang of it. Basically pick out 2 different breakfast’s..The egg scramble mentioned here or a green smoothie and just alternate back and forth or have whatever you feel like. And then have about 5 different lunch/dinner meals that you know how to make and are comfortable with.  You probably already do this anyway, you are just replacing your meals with healthier choices

Your five different lunch/dinner meals could be
  • Bratwurst/Sausages and golden potato’s.
  • Ground Beef with Mixed veggies and tahini Sauce
  • Salad with roasted chicken
  • Salad with Salmon
  • Juicy steak with a sweet potato
2. Put Potato’s in the microwave. Simply wash off potato, then pierce by stabbing it with a fork to let out heat while in microwave, and then put it in the microwave for about 5 minutes

3. Make food in bunches for the whole week. That means Cook a bunch of chicken/Sausages/steak/Ground beef and then just save it in the fridge for the week. That way whenever you want a meal, just pop a potato in the microwave, or make a quick salad and reheat your meat.

Cavemen Didn’t Get Cavities..But Why?

When I was younger I always used to wonder how did our ancestors ever survive without toothbrushes and toothpaste? Didn’t they all lose their teeth by the time they were 15? I brushed my teeth twice a day, went to the dentist every six months and STILL got cavities.  Our ancestors must have been chewing apples with their gums right?

Well it turns out that our hunter-gathere ancestors didn’t get cavities. Like ever.

And when I switched to a paleo diet two years ago I stopped getting cavities as well. I skipped out on the dentist for two years and when I showed up.. Zero cavities. I had cut out all the processed sugars that I was sure was mucking up my teeth and gums. But it turns out that the answer as to why Hunter-gatherer’s didn’t get cavities might be even a little more complex than that.

In a study published in the journal Nature Genetics, a team of Australian scientists have come up with a different hypothesis. Yes processed sugars ruin your teeth, but our ancestor’s teeth went bad long before the invention of Coca Cola. It all started with the invention of agriculture and our diet changing from that of meat and vegetables to now eating carbohydrate rich foods such as wheat and barley. The problem with this change in diet is that harmful bacteria, especially adapt at feeding off of these carbohydrates began to flourish in our new bread and pasta eating mouths and won out over the friendly bacteria that were the original inhabitants. This lead to gum disease, cavities, and perhaps even diseases not normally associated with the mouth such as diabetes and heart disease. The effect of having your mouth in a state of constant immune response in order to fight off bad bacteria can lead to problems elsewhere in the body.

Just another reason to ditch the grains and start eating Paleo. Avoiding a mouthful of harmful bacteria.

A picture of the Tribal Maori's Teeth Before Adopting Western Diet

 

The Maori's Teeth After Adopting Western Diet