Life Back on the Road

It's taken me a bit to get to this. After two back to back weeks on the road (with a 36 hour home layover), I am finally back to my normal routine back here in good old Brooklyn. Some fun stuff to report from travel, so here it goes.

I left you promising I'd give you an update on my first real running barefoot attempt, so let's start there. My first week on the road was in Denver. I landed very late Sunday night and had to be up and running on Monday morning, so by the time Monday night rolled around, I crashed. I planned for my barefoot run to go down Tuesday morning. I decided to do my run on the treadmill because it would afford me a far more pliable surface than the road would. I also knew I had to keep the miles slow and short because this would be a very different experience than my body was used to. So off I went at 5am Tuesday morning.

Let me first start with the observation that altitude really does have on athleticism. Having been to Denver before, but never as an athlete, I felt a little less prepared for this-- I mean, you hear it, but its another thing to experience it. It didn't take me long to feel that impact rather acutely as my pace was naturally slowed by a sense that I couldn't get nearly enough air in me. The run itself felt a little strange at first. I'm getting more used to a ball-of-foot strike using my newtons, but what I hadn't expected is how jarring that impact can feel with nothing at all there. It took me a few steps before I noticed I was totally changing up my land to something a lot smoother and lighter. I'm not sure the entire explanation for how that happened because it wasn't conscious, but I was definitely aware that almost right away my body was conditioned to do something, it did it, it hurt, it modified. Much unlike being in my newtons, I didn't have to think about foot placement-- my body just sort of did it because of comfort. I don't think I appreciated how far off of normal biomechanics shoes really make things until that moment. It was eye opening.

I ran about 2 miles. Slowly. I was thinking I wanted to do more because it was feeling good except that there was a small spot on the inside of my right arch just behind the ball of my foot that could feel a rub from the seam of the vibram itself. I didn't want to rub that spot raw and realized I would need to get my feet used to a lot of time in the shoes first, but ultimately thats what made me stop. At no point in my run did my knees hurt. At no point did I knick the inside of my ankle bone with my opposite foot as I often do in shoes. It felt good and easy.

While in Denver I decided to check out my local Crossfit affiliate-- I am learning that this is critical to my keeping my sense of sanity on the road. So I wound up at Front Range Crossfit, the site of the Rocky Mountain Qualifiers for the Crossfit games. It was great to do a workout with a group of people that really brought their game-- and despite the incredible challenge the altitude was giving me, I hit a new PR in a lift that has stymied me for a while. So after 2 days of working with the crew there, I was beyond thrilled.

From there I headed home for a mere 36 hours which was mostly laundry, restocking cat food and some quiet time before I was on a train to Virginia (this had all unfolded on Monday in Denver). I figured I'd try out my luck there too and wound up at another Crossfit affiliate-- Crossfit Fairfax where the workout was equally challenging, but I loved it. This affiliate will likely be a frequent stop for me going forward if I spend time in Virginia.

My week at home has been good-- I am finally hitting my groove again and have really enjoyed coming back to my own box and working out again with the crew. It's nice to have everyone tell me how much I have been missed-- my affiliate really does feel like a bit of family.

And on that note, I am going to stop with a notation that I will need to explain in more detail, but...

This weekend we have a big event at the box. Jacinto turns 70. Jacinto is one of the Crossfit trainers and a bit of a legend, truth be told. We call him the Warrior and there are tee-shirts many of us sport with his picture on the front. Here is a picture I took of him at the recent Northeast Qualifier Games where Jacinto went toe to toe with all the far younger male competitors. He is our hero, to say the least.


In honor of Jacinto's 70th birthday, we do the workout of Jacinto's choice, and this annual event has become known as Jacintostorm. So tomorrow, I will be executing the following workout:

Run 620 meters
70 Squats
70 Push-ups
70 Pull-ups or Jumping Pull-Ups
70 Wall Ball Shots with a weighted medicine ball
70 Kettlebell Swings
70 Deadlifts 65lbs
Run 620 meters

Yeah, looks painful huh? So tomorrow we get our asses kicked for and with Jacinto, who proves to us year after year that you are never too old to throw down.

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Barefoot Running

I gave this topic some brief mention back on the old blog, but after some time, I need to come back to it, cause this week it's gonna be big... I'm learning to run barefoot.

Yep. You heard me. And here's how I am gonna do it.


That, my friends, is my leg and foot (you can tell by the pasty, glow-in-the-dark pallor) ... sporting my new pair of (drumroll, please...) Vibram Five Fingers.

So these are my new shoes. Are they dorky? You better believe it. Will I look silly wearing them? Absa-smurfly. Will they allow me to run injury free while improving the biomechanics of my run? I believe they will. So I'm willing to look the part of the tool if it gets me where I need to be.

Back in October I tried a pair of these bad boys on, only to walk away in disappointment because the muscles in my feet did not have the flexibility and the give to articulate my toes enough to separate them into the toes of these shoes. I set out on a mission at that point to be able to strengthen my feet to help achieve that goal. Last week, I tried on a pair again and my work has paid off.

Since October I have been working on separating my toes as much as I could, using toe spreaders and toe spreading sandals. I also bought pairs of wicking socks that kept my toes separated so that I could keep wearing my sandals in the house when it was cold.

For 9 months I just sort of tried this out. What I noticed in the meantime was that my balance improved. My feet widened-- I always joked about my "ski feet," but the truth is that I struggled to find shoes in a AA width because they were so narrow. My overall flexibility improved and in small increments, the muscles that articulate my toes began to work. As of last week, my feet finally, comfortably, went into the Vibrams so I could walk around.

It's hard to describe how these things feel. I wore them for a workout at Crossfit last week-- we were doing powercleans and box jumps, so there was a fair amount of jumping involved. First thing I noticed was the extent to which my feet were it-- there isn't really a sole on these things so much as a thin layer of countoured rubber. The arch of the foot is left to do what it wants, and every place your foot wants to touch the floor, it will. My work over these past few months in yoga has been to pull up my arches and begin to stand on the outer parts of my feet while trying to engage that arch up off the floor. This will become more important as the process to running barefoot begins to take off. When jumping, the second thing I noticed is the inclination to hit on my heal and then let the rest of my feet sort of find their way to the ground. Doing this without the luxury of padding hurt. I had to begin to think about landing from a jump onto as much of my feet as I could... toes, ball, outside edge and heel, to disperse the jolt. Lastly, I needed to land lighter and more controlled. My first few powercleans were ugly and wobbly but eventually it felt good. My later box jumps felt the same way and in time I actually felt more stable doing this.

I decided as well that day to walk home in my shoes. Imagine walking for half an hour, on concrete and asphalt, totally barefoot. I've spent 36 years walking in shoes-- its rare for us all to walk around the world without them, so my first attempt at this was very strange. I could literally feel everything... every crack, every textured surface, every pebble. I noticed the extent to which my heel strike was very pronounced and hard. My inclination was to always keep my ankle at this 90 degree angle and just sort of plant my foot and roll over it and back up never allowing my ankle to release that angle. Remember back when I got my bike fitting and the fitter noted the degree to which my ankle was not flexing in either direction (the plantar flexion vs. dorsiflexion angles)-- it became pretty apparent where that behavior gets solidified-- basic walking in shoes. It felt so strange that within my first few paces, my heel strike had to adjust more forward to my midfoot and everything had to compensate. It's hard to describe this except to say that walking started taking place behind me instead of in front of me. Maybe if you have a long hallway or a yard or something you can experience this too-- when you walk in shoes, your land is forward of your hips. When you walk barefoot, your land is about equal with your hips. It's less about pulling up to where you foot landed and more about pushing back from where you currently are. It's a strange shift and hard to describe, but it became very apparent to me walking home that night.

The last several months I have been playing with a biomechanical style of running called POSE. In order to begin to adopt Pose, until I could run barefoot, I needed to cut back on my running and begin to train my body to run with a midfoot strike-- and one of the things that helped me to develop that while still providing me the cushioning of allowing my feet to strengthen, were some shoes called Newtons. Between the Newton-forced midfoot strike, and the migration towards Pose using some of the strengthening exercises they recommend, my body has finally reached a point of being ready to try barefoot running.

This week I am on the road in Denver, Colorado. I am looking forward to finding the local Crossfit affiliate and trying my first official short run in my vibrams-- in fact, I haven't packed any other shoes, so I'm backing myself into the proverbial corner of trying this out. What's the worst that can happen right?

Stay tuned for details-- this could get interesting.

I end you today on what I like to call Workout Porn (sorry Mom, but having tried Crossfit yourself you should appreciate this even more now)-- my all-time favorite Crossfit workout: The Bear. The picture of me in my profile is from doing this very workout.

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The "Paleo" Diet Primer

I've mentioned a pretty dramatic shift in the way that I eat, and now the time is right to go into all the explaining of that. But first... I thought I'd open with a fun little video that will make my life a little easier.


A lot of the concepts in there aren't new-- I've mentioned them here before, but now we'll get a little (wait for the caveman humor...) meat on the bones of the topic.

The Paleo diet-- I often like to start describing this as what I don't eat and then building it back up from there. SO... my list of Don't Eats:
- Dairy
- Grains
- Legumes
- Processed Foods

It's a short list, right? But that short list includes a lot of the typical American fare, so I'll break it out a little more. I don't eat bread, pasta, milk, yogurt, cereals, tofu, peanuts and beans. I don't eat things that start or end life in a box.

If you've known me over the past 20-something years you will recognize how very fundamental that shift is for me. When I took this challenge on in November, I did so knowing that my eating stood to be a lot healthier. In August I made the first fundamental shift in that-- I gave up being a vegetarian-- something I had been for most of my adult life. In November I took up the remainder of that shift-- away from all the grains and dairy I had lived on for most of my life. I was one of those vegetarians that described myself as a "dairy-tarian" or a "grain-atarian." I wasn't too big on green things much less things with mothers and faces. So this was a very big shift for me-- I was literally giving up everything I had spent 35 years eating.

Now what is in the Paleo diet.
- Naturally produced meat (grass fed cows, pastured chickens, wild-caught fish)
- Vegetables
- Fruit
- Nuts
- Fat (yep... it's not a bad word when its the right kind of fat.)

I've talked evolution before, and the video certainly spoke to it, but these are the kinds of things our bodies evolved to eat-- provided we, to put it in the words of Joel Salatin, "respect and honor the pigness of the pig" or any other living thing we take into our bodies. The meat I buy at the local supermarket bears no resemblance to the meat we all evolved to eat and as a result the nutritional content of that meat is radically different. When you hear the "dangers of eating red meat" it is most often tied to the effects of the production of our meat. By respecting and honoring the cowness of the cow and eating grassfed beef, those dangers seem to disappear. The same holds true for chicken and fish. If the chicken can live its life like it evolved to live it, it will grow up healthy and therefore make the people who evolved to eat it healthy. We'll talk more on this topic later-- remember, rabbit hole. We'll also talk more about fat, but in the meantime, let's talk about how this shift went and why I went this way.

For starters, I don't do anything without reading and learning alot. Before I took on the idea of the paleo shift, I had a lot of questions that needed answering. My biggest concern, as a woman in her 30s, was around removing dairy and whether I would be affecting my calcium stores at a time when I needed it most. And I was also concerned that there may be other vitamins I was going to be losing as well-- what would this mean to my overall well being? So I started to read.

If you look at the statistics for Osteoporosis, you'll see something kind of interesting. North America and Europe have the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world, with North America running right in there. When you look at consumption of dairy on a global scale you notice something similar-- Europe and North America account for the highest amounts of dairy consumption. Doesn't it seem strange that the people eating the most dairy are the ones that have the worst osteoporosis?!

As it turns out the typical western diet is highly acidic with all those grains going on. As a result, during digestion, the kidneys are recruited to help balance the acid/alkaline levels (remember that homeostasis thing I talked about). Calcium salt in the body is one of the best alkaline sources there are, so as the body acidifies, that calcium is recruited to restore the balance. Which basically means that even though we are taking in copious amounts of calcium, it's being used for other things than making bones stronger. Sure calcium does that but only when it's not being used first. Milk itself is ever-so-slightly acidic. If you think of 7.0 as acid/alkaline neutral and anything below 7 is acidic and above 7 is alkaline, milk is a 6.7, which is likely helped by the calcium content of it. But when the rest of the diet is highly acidic that calcium is always being used. The chief sources of alkaline are... vegetables! So the more vegetables you eat, the more alkaline your blood. The more alkaline your blood, the more your body can store additional alkaline agents like calcium and therefore the stronger your bones will get. But the typical western diet is so highly acidic that it actually leaches the calcium from your bones themselves and makes westerners among the most prone to osteoporosis.

And what about fiber? The supermarket shelves are loaded with grain-based products promoting themselves as "high fiber" like Fiber One cereal, breads, etc. And with the recent push for whole grains, everyone is eating whole wheat everything... whole wheat pasta to whole wheat pizza dough-- it is everywhere. So it turns out there are 2 kinds of fiber-- soluble and insoluble. Soluble fibers can break down, mix with water and help lower that bad LDL cholesterol that I told you a few days ago builds up in your arteries in case you spring a leak and keep your heart warm through the cold months of fall, winter and spring. Insoluble fibers, on the other hand, cannot be broken down, and provide bulk, but pass through the digestive system largely unprocessed. These are the things you eat to feel full, but because your body cannot break them down, they cannot pull nutrients out of them. Soluble fibers are found in things like vegetables, citrus fruits, oat and rye, strawberries, beans and peas, and apple pulp. Insoluble fiber is found in things like whole-wheat breads, wheat cereals, wheat bran, cabbage, beets, carrots, brussels sprouts, turnips, cauliflower, and apple skin. So while you are correct in the observation that both grains and vegetables cross those lines, adding in the acidification aspect makes things a little more clear. I can eat insoluble vegetables without upping my blood acidity-- I can get the calories and the bulk without the negative consequence. But I can't eat the grains and beans that are soluble without making my blood more acid. As a result, The veggies and fruits come out on top for fiber and the grains aren't giving me a net positive (yes, oats may help with the LDL cholesterol, but they offset the alkalinity).

I went into my Paleo shift in early November after requesting my doctor do a full blood panel on me. We recorded my cholesterol levels, my calcium levels, my triglycerides... all of that. My goal was a month or two of paleo, because it seemed awfully restrictive at first glance, and then we'd look at my blood results again and see how things shook out. My first week, I will confess, was awful. My first 3 days I felt openly hostile and the following few days I felt insatiable-- I wanted to eat everything around. Eventually things began to quiet and I got used to how to eat-- including how to eat without cooking all the time. It was definitely a lifestyle change for me-- I needed to figure out paleo convenience, which becomes a little more challenging. I'll get into more of that later, but eventually something unsual happened. I felt awesome. I felt better than I had ever felt before. And I stopped resisting the diet and feeling like I was being deprived and no longer craved grains and dairy. And then came Thanksgiving.

It's hard to hold Paleo over Thanksgiving, and truth be told, I gave myself the day as a cheat day with no cause for concern. The next 3 days, however, I felt awful-- I felt weak and heavy and bloated and just kinda bummed out. I don't think I ever appreciated the food-mood connection until post Thanksgiving. And since then I have not looked back. As for the blood work, I decided to wait until the one year mark to see how it all shakes out. In general, I live by the 80-20 rule and every now and again don't say no to a big piece of chocolate cake, but I gotta say, I've given myself a few outs that just lacked appeal when it all came down to it. I remember one night in particular when I was too tired to make dinner and gave myself permission to have some pizza. I really thought this would excite me, but it just didn't. And in the end, I went home and quickly cooked up a salmon filet and made a salad and was quite happy and content with myself. It was a day I never expected to see.

I am entering into my 7th month of this diet now, and I have to tell you, I will be eating this way for the rest of my life-- no question about it. I feel energized all the time. And dare I say it, I feel happier. I've gone from vegetarian to cave-dweller-- my diet could not be more night and day from where it was a year ago. It has given me lots of interesting thoughts on the topic of vegetarianism that I will share with you another day. I believe my diet has largely accounted for the dramatic shift in body composition I blogged about recently. I look and feel a lot better and for the first time in my life, I am developing muscles, which is not easy for a relative ectomorph. In a couple more months we will see what the blood work shows once and for all, but back to the very question that opened this chapter 2 blog... Am I Healthy?? The answer comes back a lot more firmly in the yes category with this new shift in eating.

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Sleeping, Hormones and More of that Evolution Thingy

So my last entry introduced some of my thoughts on evolutionary eating. I have a lot more on that topic and promise to introduce more details, but I wanted to also dive in to the second prong of that change and it was around sleep.

When I was a kid, I had a nice early bedtime that I hated. In general, we'd go to bed around 8pm during the school year, and many nights I'd turn on my radio and hope for the luck of tuning in some radio station from Quebec so I could listen to French talk radio. If I couldn't tune that in, my fall back was always the Doctor Demento show that played every night on a local station outside Boston. I'd lie in the dark of my room and fall asleep to the radio I kept quiet enough that my parents never knew I was staying up late-- but it never worked, I'd always fall asleep anyway.

As an adult, sleep started to transition almost to a luxury-- I'd sleep when I could (and relish in it), but it could be traded for extra hours to get work done, hang out with friends, clean the house, or just plain stress out about daytime hours. Right around the point where I was getting ready to run the Boston Marathon I was at one of my most sleep deprived states in my 35 years. Work was crazy and most weekday nights my team was working until 1am and back at our desks at 7am. In the downtime, I'd try to untangle my brain but more and more often I had this sense of panic that bordered on paranoia. The sleep exhaustion was taking a toll on me I didn't know how to explain. Now I do.

Human bodies exist in a state of balance or an equilibrium we call "homeostasis." Our bodies, whether we are aware of it or not, are constantly playing this regulating game to keep us in this state of equilibrium. That game involves lots of hormones and biochemicals inside the body that respond to changes in environment. Probably the most familiar pair of these regulators are insulin and glucagon that regulate blood glucose. When blood has too much glucose floating around the hormone insulin springs into action and starts storing the excess glucose. When blood has too little glucose, the glucagon visits those same storage sites and pulls some glucose back out and puts it back into the blood. So these two hormones work in conjunction with each other to keep blood sugar in homeostasis. Follow? Cool.

Turns out there are a bunch of these hormone (or biochemical) pairs, that regulate a bunch of functions in similar ways. The ones that I started to really poke at were serotonin and melatonin. The reason I started really coming back to this one was an observation I had made-- the more tired I was, the more depressed and paranoid, right? Already told you that... not news. But the observation was that if these two hormones were in a homeostatic pair, maybe there was something to that biochemically-- I mean, the defacto treatment for depression and paranoia these days are called "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)" that include brands like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. So if the drug companies were treating depression and paranoia by futzing with the balancing pair to the sleep hormone melatonin (and the natural supplement all the tired folks are buying at the local drugstore), maybe this really was something real. I dug deeper (remember we are in a rabbit hole).

What the heck is serotonin anyway, and why are people inhibiting its reuptake. Um, and what about the initial uptake-- why are we doing it a second time?! My head was swimming, so let's start from the top.

Serotonin comes from the gastrointestinal tract and its main role is to control things like appetite, mood and anger. But serotonin also plays a role in managing memory, aggression, sexual behavior, cardiovascular activity, respiratory activity, motor output, sensory and neuroendocrine function and perception.

Melatonin, on the other hand, is synthesized in the pineal gland of the brain and its job is to regulate the body's circadian rhythm, as well as do a few other fancy things like protect mitochondrial DNA. The protection mechanism of melatonin is often referred to as a "powerful antioxidant" when you try to buy it at the drugstore. (Antioxidants are what protect us against those "free radicals" that apparently come into our bodies and cause mutations. So protecting cellular DNA is good stuff.)

So now you are wondering the obvious-- what makes these two things related? What homeostatic balancing act goes on between these two things-- they seem so totally different from each other. The link is that serotonin eventually gets converted into melatonin. Both serotonin and melatonin (along with all the other hormones in the body) work with their respective "receptors." The receptor binds to the hormone and allows it to be expressed. In the example I talked about SSRIs, drugs like Paxil are introduced to prevent the serotonin from being bound to their receptors and therefore expressed. In essence, this leaves someone taking an SSRI awash in excess serotonin that is never able to be expressed.

There are a few reactions your body has to a high serotonin level-- most notably is an increase in cortisol and adrenaline. These two hormones are the basis of the "fight or flight" instinct. The more serotonin floats around, the higher your fight or flight chemicals. The way to prevent this reaction is to allow for the expression of serotonin that eventually leads to conversion to melatonin and allows for the expression of that circadian rhythm and sleep. An interesting side note here-- unmedicated depressed people often talk about wanting to sleep-- this is a side-effect of this very process-- the serotonin present in that mood-state is looking for conversion to melatonin via its receptors. In turn this conversion to melatonin and therefore natural sleep lessens the serotonin and makes the person, literally, happier.

So here I am prepping for the Boston Marathon. I am exhausted, literally. Which leaves me with a lot more serotonin than my body can convert. See, it takes about 2 hours of darkness before the body can start to produce melatonin, so when I was getting around 4-5 hours of sleep, I was really only getting some 2-3 hours of serotonin to melatonin conversion. By hanging out at my desk at the soft glow of my laptop, I was preventing that process from starting. Which in turn was allowing my serotonin to elevate over time, which was kicking on my cortisol and adrenaline responses and I was getting agitated and paranoid and depressed. Throw in the long runs on the weekend which naturally produce a stress-response of cortisol and adrenaline and things were looking kind of messy.

I needed to sleep.

Fast forward to now. I've been playing around lately with timing sleep. If you think about it, it really wasn't until recently that society as a whole stopped living life by the rise and fall of the sun. In essence, even if we wanted to, we couldn't affect that serotonin-melatonin game all that much-- it got dark at night whether we chose to give into it or not. We could sit by a candle or a camp fire, but we weren't able to bring day into night like we can today. At night, when the sun went down, that conversion just sort of happened and like it or not we all got sleepy and crashed and the next morning when the sun came up our serotonin was low, our cortisol was low, our adrenaline was low and we were ready for a new day.

Now I am totally simplifying all of this. I am calling this an introduction, because this stuff actually ties into the whole insulin-glucagon homeostasis game too, but we'll get there over time, I promise. The point of this post is to introduce the whole idea that evolutionarily we have a nightly reset switch-- when it gets dark, your body naturally wants to start that conversion process. It's why 8 year old me lying in the dark listening to Doctor Demento hoping my parents didn't realize I was still awake never stayed awake very long-- the darkness kicked all this stuff off and eventually I went to sleep. When I grew up, since I didn't just hang out all sneakily in the dark anymore and could keep the lights on, the sleep never came and the paranoia, anger, sadness, stress, what-have-you mounted. By re-establishing that lights-out when it got dark, I got, biochemically, happier and less stressed. Sure I was feeling more rested, but it wasn't about feeling rested, it was about that reset switch that my body had evolved to use finally being thrown. And yes, I still sneak my radio (or my ipod) into bed with me and listen a little while the whole darkness thing kicks off. One day maybe Doctor Demento will start streaming audio or podcasting or something so I can listen again and drift off to sleep singing songs about frontal lobotomies.

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A History Primer of Food and Survival

Cause its a right good place to start. And the journey is kinda long and wonky and crazy-- it will take me a few days to get this one through.

So I left you with this weird kind of epiphany that I was the obese size 4 person. I was small but I was, for lack of a better way of saying it, soft. My body doesn't distribute fat well at all. Much like my father, I have what I like to call chicken legs. It doesn't matter how big or small I am, my legs don't change-- they are sticks. Same with my arms. And so you take out those key pieces of real estate and I have very few places to store fat-- my torso is the main one and my face and neck a little less-- but enough that when I lose weight people always comment on my face-- my jawline being more prominant, etc.

Belly fat is scary fat. It didn't used to be. Our bodies evolved to store fat in our bellies because it protected our vital organs against exposure to the cold-- so back before we had central heating and good lighting to all those long dark winter nights when freezing to death was a real concern for human survival. (think back to cave times... we'll be talking alot about cave times in this blog, rest assured.) So imagine a gorgeous summer day-- everywhere you look in the hours of abundant sunlight are plants and vegetables that are sources of carbohydrate (you know... the real carbs... not the bread carbs that came much later in human evolution). Summer is all about carbohydrates-- fruits and vegetables are abundant. And carbohydrates do two things for you-- one, they get converted into 'right now' energy and whatever else gets stored in body fat-- around your vital organs in your core. See, the body evolved to do that because when carbs are plentiful-- its summer time... which means that the cold of winter is just around the corner and you need every bit of help you can get. (Interesting side note about all this evolutionary stuff... your body also evolved to get cholesterol... that artery clogging stuff, because it fuels your heart and can keep your blood warm and flowing throughout the winter and patch your arteries any time of the year if you "spring a leak." But come spring time you are supposed to be pretty much depleted of cholesterol from the long cold winter.)

Some people distribute fat a little better than others-- storing deposits in their legs, their butt, their arms, etc. and the point is still the same-- its a reserve your body evolved to call on during the harsh conditions when food wasn't available. And now we don't have to contend with that lack of food and harsh cold. So we never have a period of utilizing that fat store for survival. In the grand scheme of things the evolution of not needing to protect ourselves against the harsh winter is infinitesimally short in comparison to how long we did need it. Homo sapiens first showed up as the new kid in town approximately 250,000 years ago, the first real evidence of a hearth fire some 125,000 years ago and the lightbulb in 1879 (130 years ago). All this is to say that the whole protection from the elements and abundance we expect now isn't in our DNA. And our DNA has not changed since homo sapiens came along. We got the same stuff going on that our cave-dwelling brethren did some 250,000 years back.

So we evolved to need fat. And cholesterol. But we only had exposure to it during one season and the storage was to fuel life for the remaining 3. We've kind of fallen off that bit.

So now let's think about today's food choices-- and what better a place to look than the trust food pyramid that the US Department of Agriculture puts out. Here... we need a fun graphic. Here's what I find really interesting about this picture. See the base of our pyramid-- the grains? Those grains really only appeared, like, yesterday in the grand scheme of evolution... and grains cannot be eaten raw, so we know that in order for our cave brethren to use them, they needed true control of one more thing-- cooking. Ever try eating a raw corn cob? Notsomuch. Grains required cooking in order to make them edible to homo sapiens... by themselves many grains are actually toxic until the bad stuff is cooked off. Actual agriculture and the cultivation of this new food source didn't really show up until some 10,000 years ago when early people caught on to this idea of cooking off the toxins so that they could really eat some of these weird grain things. All things considered, in terms of homo sapiens the species, that's like... yesterday. So while there was the convenience factor of growing our own stuff, our ability to process and consume grains is a new realization.

(Quick jarring leap forward in time-- there is the whole weirdness about conflicts of interest with that funny pyramid thing. Who here is a lawyer? Doesn't it seem weird that the US Department of Agriculture is telling you to eat more grains? Of course they want you to eat more grains-- they're marketing their wares. But let's not go there for now...)

It gets interesting when you start comparing the amount of carbs people take in as a result of that emergence of agriculture. Just for fun I pulled out some interesting comparisons-- on the order of number of carbs per 100 grams of food:

brussels sprouts: 8.95 grams
carrots: 9.58 grams
mushrooms: 3.42 grams
apples: 13.81 grams
figs: 19.18 grams

you get the point. Now let's look at the same measure for grain-based food:

whole grain wheat flour: 71.58 grams
corn: 74.26 grams
long grain brown rice 77:24 grams

so here's my point-- I'm not a big "don't eat carbs" person and often find myself quietly laughing at the irony of Dr. Atkins himself dying of the impact of his own diet, but at the same time, there's a startling differential there. When agriculture came along a fundamental balance shifted such that we are absorbing more carbs faster than ever. And if you follow the wisdom of the food guide, you are eating 6-11 servings of that stuff. Which, as I mentioned earlier, evolved to be used for short term energy and then stored for the long haul. It's dense and sciency and all, but you can get a decent overview and details on wikipedia if you want to understand it a little more.

My point here is this-- we are, metabolicly speaking, the same as we were the day some 250,000 years ago when a switch was thrown that made homo sapiens emerge. We still employ all the strategies that got her through survival and haven't really adapted to this abundance we have right now. Our bodies either need to catch up or we need to start aligning our food with what helped us evolve and survive in the first place.

Ultimately, I chose the later. The results of that decision have been powerful. And therein lies a large part of the journey.

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