She transformed her geeky childhood love of Rollerskating into a roller derby league and a book, Rollergirl: Totally True Tales from the Track, written in what’s described on Amazon as a “mouthy, tough-as-nails style”. (You see why I like her?)

She didn’t stop there. The former “chubby nerd” found Crossfit, got lean and powerful, and transformed her family’s love of food into a beautiful, accessible, easy-to-use Primal cookbook, Well Fed: Paleo Recipes for People Who Love to Eat, available in softcover and e-book format.

In this interview, we chat about the book as well as things like:

• Mel’s childhood dorkitude
• her struggles to lose weight and manage her thyroid issues
• silly diet tricks
• how to transition to eating healthy
• why eating Primal means you say an exuberant, lovin’ “yes” to certain foods (rather than “no” to others)
• how to navigate healthy eating with your family — especially how to maintain your family’s ethnic heritage
• how to stop worrying and learn to love food again

Tune in now!

>> Download MP3

And then check out Well Fed and Mel’s blog!

I know the word “paleo” in the title is probably what compelled you to choose this cookbook over others, which means you probably care about your health. I’m very glad! But my mission isn’t to clobber you with the healthfulness of the recipes in this book.

My mission is to inspire you with stories and tempt you with recipes that will make you want to smash in your face with joy.
–Well Fed intro

Mel, doing what she does best

“This book is about women, sports, and happiness. How the confidence women build in sport translates into the rest of their lives. How the challenges they face by participating in a sport, and the way they meet those challenges, translates into greater strength and the ability to overcome the obstacles in their lives outside of sports; and how their achievements in sports translate into happy lives.

This is a book about the courage it takes to challenge ourselves in how we live our lives.”
—Mina Samuels

In her thoughtful, inspiring work Run Like a Girl: How Strong Women Make Happy Lives, author and athlete Mina Samuels explores the ways in which sports and physical activity can change women’s bodies, spirits, and lives for the better — the ways in which we can all (regardless of our body shape, size, and ability) benefit from movement and physical empowerment.

She illustrates the book with her own story as well as the stories of many other women. In this podcast, I chat with her about the issues her book raises.

	>>Download MP3

He’s not a personal trainer. He doesn’t work in a sports-science lab. In fact, he’s never participated in athletics in most traditional senses of the word.

His daily professional life and mission doesn’t revolve around physical culture.

In short, he’s probably one of the best people to give the “outsider-within” perspective — and a role model for the rest of us desk monkeys who got picked last for every team.

Physical culture

In his book, Staufenberg explores the history and development of “physical culture” — a loosely organized movement of deep immersion in the pursuit of health, strength, and top physical performance.

Physical culture is a lived practice; devotees seek mastery over self and skill rather than a “look” or a particular athletic feat (although they can perform pretty well and they usually look good naked). As Staufenberg writes:

The most important aspect of Physical Culture does not lie in training, mechanics, apparatus, or diets; neither the measurements of your biceps nor the poundage you can lift are the most crucial component. Rather, in sensible Physical Culture, education reigns supreme.

Physical culture, then, is a set of behaviours and a method — a profound and lifelong engagement with the wondrous powers of the human body — rather than a “workout plan” or “goal” in and of itself.

Although it emphasizes participating and becoming adept in a wide range of sports and activities, physical culture is closely linked to the so-called “iron game” — aka weight lifting. The term “iron game” connotes the sense of play and focus-without-outcome spirit that characterizes the overall physical culture project as a whole.

Here, Staufenberg shares his thoughts on physical culture and why it’s still important today.

When did you get interested in physical culture?

I didn’t actually have any interest in physical culture until college. My dad lifted weights in our basement and I had a lot of friends who played sports, but it didn’t interest me growing up. When I got to college I took up some interest in my health and fitness and employed the usual haphazard approach to gym life: I took some classes, did some yoga, pedaled a stationary bike most days of the week and played with the weight machines.

I did this for a couple of years without having much interest in educating myself further on the matter. I was in better health and more fit than I ever was before then, so I didn’t see the need.

I only began to take a real intellectual interest in health, strength and fitness when I started eating meat again right before my final semester at school. I started to read a lot more about diet, which took me to reading about exercise, which lead me to reading Vince Gironda’s materials.

I remember I ordered an old copy of Unleashing the Wild Physique and used it religiously. For the first time in my life I was employing my brain when it came to developing my body and I immediately put on 15 pounds of muscle and leaned out further. For someone who was previously about 130 pounds and “skinny-fat”, this was a big deal and enough to get me hooked on the culture.

Because I started out reading Gironda’s material and interviews with people who took an interest in his material I naturally kept looking at older material instead of more recent materials. I remember reading an interview with Randy Roach (author of Muscle Smoke and Mirrors), in which he talked about the original physical culturists, the old timers from the turn of the century. They sounded interesting to me so I started reading all of their books that I could find.

What do you continue to find compelling, attractive, and/or intriguing about physical culture?

I think it’s really compelling and interesting to know the history of where the modern health, strength and fitness industry came from, but also why it sprang up when and where it did.

Film studies was one of my passions. I already had a background in the history and intellectual climate of the late 19th and early 20th centuries from studying film history, and when I began to read the old timers’ books I couldn’t help but start drawing conclusions about why physical culture happened when and where it did, and basically why physical culture had to emerge in this time and place.

People who are already immersed in the health and fitness world will find it interesting to learn how physical culture originated, and why we continue to need it to this day. This understanding can be a good entry point for people who’ve never really seen the point of taking an interest in their body.

In the modern world we can’t afford to be ignorant of physical culture. It’s that simple, and looking at the history there are compelling reasons why that’s true.

Just as the person of sedentary habits and weak body possesses a correspondingly sluggish mind and lack of energy, so those who assiduously pursue a physical development gain not only that desired government of their organs, but in marked degree obtains a thorough mastery of their will and, consequently, an easy and contented mind.
– George Hackenschmidt – The Way to Live

How did you find this source material?

I’d love to entertain and spread the notion that the material was difficult to track down, that I hunted for years at great danger and expense to myself to find it, but I’d just be lying to make myself sound cooler and more dedicated than I am.

The truth is a lot of this material is freely out there and available to anyone with the interest to check it out.

I found most of the materials used for the book on the sandowplus.uk website, which is an invaluable resource for those interested in reading some of the source texts. I found other manuals and books that I used through online searches as well. I know that there are some people who sell printed copies of some of the old manuals as well, and eBay is a decent place to find some original printings and magazines. But if you’re just interested in reading a lot of the physical culturists’ materials you can find them online for free.

Now just because the material is free and readily available doesn’t mean that it’s all very accessible.

The more recent material like Tony Sansone’s book sounds more modern and is very easy to read, but a lot of the earlier work can be difficult to work your way through. The language can be hard to understand, and most of the books aren’t particularly well illustrated.

We take for granted how clearly most exercise, diet and health books are laid out these days and how clearly their material is presented. The old timers’ books were a lot more literary and can be comparatively dense.

However, these books take on a more explicitly philosophical character than most modern books in the field. It’s not all bad.

Some of the older books remain incredibly easy to find and read. You just need to start with the right ones.

I recommend beginning with George Hackenschmidt’s The Way to Live, which I clearly cribbed my title from. It’s a great introduction to the old timers, but even if you’re only planning on reading one older physical culture book it should be his.

If you’re looking to read more than I recommend moving on to Bernarr MacFadden’s work. Known as the Father of Physical Culture, Macfadden wrote an incredible amount of books on a variety of subjects relating to health, strength and fitness, and created the publishing empire that fueled the movement. His books are pretty simple and straightforward, but he writes with a personal flair that makes them enjoyable as well as informative.

What are the most compelling messages in early physical culture?

There are three.

Message 1: Aid and assist nature.

The old timers understood that the natural way is the best way — that your body can produce anything and everything you need from it if you just follow a few natural rules.

These days people want to get certain physical results without following the rules of nature that spell out how their bodies are intended to work, so they turn to dangerous pharmaceuticals and the like.

One example of this is Viagra. If you just take care of your body, if you eat whole natural foods, if you exercise, and if you keep your mental and emotional health in good shape, than you’ll be blessed with a sex drive that will all but cause you problems. But people want to eat crap, never get off the coach, and refuse to deal with the psychological and emotional factors limiting their performance, and still prop wood whenever they want.

Now, I want to make it clear in this case I’m not talking about steroids or performance enhancing technology pharmecueticals or anything like that. I’m not talking about elite athletics and the practical demands of the modern sports world where taking anything and everything is necessary to compete, nor am I talking about people with serious medical conditions. All of that’s a discussion for another day, and one I’m probably not qualified to dive into.

Message 2: Most people don’t really want to be superhuman.

I think Sandow said it best when he explained that most people don’t need or desire the “strength of Atlas” for their lives. Most of us just want the health to live a long life devoid of serious illness, the strength and energy to get through our day and apply ourselves totally to our mission in life, the physical attractiveness to feel good about ourselves when we look in the mirror or go to the beach, and the athleticism to enjoy playing pickup sports and for having fun sex.

That’s what most of us really want out of our physical culture and the old timers knew it.

Unfortunately these days we’re assaulted via the media with the twin poles of superhuman athletes and fear-inducing messages of rampant debilitating conditions like morbid obesity, massive degenerative disease and the like.

There isn’t a lot of middle ground in the modern discourse for just having a good, healthy, human body- despite the fact that most of us fall into that middle ground when it comes to our needs and desires. The old timers’ physical culture provides a great starting point for developing that middle ground.

Message 3: Health springs from a healthy lifestyle.

The old timers knew that good health was about healthy living on a day to day basis, not about repeatedly bingeing on body recomposition. Persistence and persistence alone produces strength and good health.

In England the majority of healthy young women think nothing of a ten-mile walk. They will play lawn-tennis for hours against a well-matched opponent, row a boat up stream, and swim half a mile or so without dreaming that they are doing anything extraordinary.
–”The Physical Culture of Women”, from The Illustrated American, 1890

Instruction for women fencers, 1890

Why is your book important?

Aside from the above three points that I think we’ve lost in modern physical culture I also think it’s important to understand that nearly all the debates we have today about diet and exercise were being argued 100-150 years ago. The old timers debated cooked food diets versus raw food diets, vegetarianism versus meat eating, bodyweight versus iron, etc.

When you realize that these debates have been thrown about for a long time you realize that they aren’t going to be settled anytime soon, if ever.

Instead of allowing the debate to paralyze you as you wait for the definitively “right answer’” to come about, you can just pick some answers that work for you and commit to them.

Diet and exercise regimens are more about philosophy than anything else. Ultimately most people select their regimens according to how they feel about the world as a whole and then go and find the data that justifies their selection.

What about physical culture in non-Western regions?

As conceptualized in the book I’m not aware of other regions where physical culture played an important role, but my ignorance doesn’t mean they weren’t out there.

Every society has its physical culture, and all indigenous societies have an understanding of how to produce good health and strength. The difference in physical culture as described in the book was that it was intended to be applied largely to combat forces of urbanization and sedentary living.

India had a systematic form of physical culture that could translate to an urban industrialized environment, and which resembled and informed what the old-timers were creating closely enough to merit mentioning. There are physical culture books produced in India by Indians, and there were Indians who (like Prof. K.V. Iyer) were considered part of the movement.

As far as I know there weren’t any other regions outside of the US and Europe that were so directly connected to the physical culture movement.

India developed a system of physical culture thousands of years before the Europeans developed theirs because Indians valued the body as a route for ultimate meaning while Europeans saw the physical as an impediment to illumination. India wasn’t alone in their mature view of the body, but their systems translated relatively smoothly into European thought processes.

Clearly this is a massive, sweeping, over-generalized statement, but I think as a general idea it holds up.

What would an average day of PC look like?

If you followed the routines and understandings outlined and agreed upon by most of the old timers then a day would look like the following.

You wake up at a set time, the same time you wake up every day. The old timers often recommended sleeping from 11 pm to 7 am.

You then perform some light stretching in bed, or you would go for a short walk, some form of light physical activity to get your blood flowing.

A number of the old timers recommended you perform your concentrated physical exercises first thing in the morning, so you will probably perform your training routine as soon as you’re thoroughly awake. No matter what your training looked like you’d perform it in a minimum of clothing, in a room that had proper circulation and open windows.

Once you complete your training you would wash thoroughly and coarsely and vigorously towel off, as the old timers said this gave your circulation a workout. Some recommended washing with cold water, others with warm water, but few recommended bathing with hot water.

Washing and taking care of your grooming and hygiene would take at least a half hour, which gave your body time to relax after your workout to the point where you’d be ready to eat.

The old timers generally opposed eating immediately after exercise due to their focus on circulation. They felt that you blood needed to circulate through your muscles after exercise, and that eating a meal drew blood away from your muscles and into your digestive apparatus.

When your body was ready you’d eat a large breakfast of whole, natural foods that were minimally prepared and seasoned. You’d eat until you weren’t hungry any more, and you’d pay careful attention to chewing thoroughly. You wouldn’t read or do anything else that required a lot of brain power when eating. The old timers recommended you focus on your meal to optimize digestion.

After your meal you would go out and do your work or your chores for the day. Most of the old timers recommended against eating lunch, or recommended eating a lunch that was very light. Most of the old timers opposed eating more than twice a day. MacFadden even argued that the 3 meal a day plan killed more people than any other habit.

You’d go about your day and finish your work and then return home and eat a sizeable dinner. A long walk in the evening was usually recommended, and then you would relax and retire before heading to bed.

Your whole week would pretty much look like this. The old timers generally argued for as much regularity as possible in your life.

They argued a moderate, sensible and easy going lifestyle produced the best health in most people.

Strength comes not from adding, but eliminating the unhelpful, from wise reservation, highlighting the core philosophy of a balanced moderation… Your training and your life should invigorate, not drain… If after your exercise, your bath and your rub–down, you feel fit to battle for a kingdom, then your schedule is right.
–How to Live

How closely does your own life mirror the principles of PC set out in the book?

There are certain specific habits that I retain from studying the old timers, but the main principle I’ve taken from my studies is the importance of the link between philosophy and physical culture.

If you wanted to you could develop good strength, energy and health by closely following any of the better books from the old timers. I’ve done so before. They work.

But from a purely results-oriented viewpoint there have absolutely been advancements in training techniques and dietary knowledge over the last century that produce larger measureable results in less time and with less effort.

Here’s the rub though: You can’t say that modern cutting edge sports science is better than the old timers’ methods without first defining the word “better”.

The old timers and the new school offer radically different views on what your relationship should be with your body, and there’s a direct link between the relationship you hold with your body and the relationship you hold with the world. The way you eat and the way you train aren’t isolated from the way you approach your life as a whole.

You can produce measurably higher physical output by approaching your body as an isolated, haphazardly developed machine that’s open to “hacking” if you want, but pause for a moment before you take that plunge and consider what kind of relationship that approach will develop between you and your body.

Is that the lens through which you want to see yourself, and by proxy the larger world? Metrics and tracking have their place, but in my opinion they exist to serve a deeper sense of purpose in life, or else these achievements ring hollow.

While they certainly held a certain mechanistic viewpoint of their bodies, the old timers ultimately didn’t see their bodies as fundamentally flawed machines open to exploitation. They revered their bodies and the natural flow that sustained and developed them.

The term “better” depends on the personal philosophy you want to adopt.

Do you want to see your body and the world as sacred and purposeful, or do you want to see your body and the world as a cold and mechanical ROI-based lab?

You can have a great looking physique, but without harmony, there is no happiness; without happiness, there will be eventual collapse on either or both the physical and mental fronts.
–Randy Roach, in How to Live

For the first while, they laughed at me. Or fretted. (No bread? But that’s so unhealthy!) Then they tolerated me.

Now some of them just roll their eyes and don’t offer me ice cream, although I still have to say “No thanks, grandma!” when she asks at nearly every meal during my annual visits, Would you girls like some cereal? (She forgets. But it’s super cute when she calls me and my 40-year-old friend “girls”.)

And others… they aren’t laughing any more. I lent mom a copy of The Paleo Solution. She read it, went cold turkey on grains and dairy, and never went back. Even on a trip to Mexico. No corn, no flour tortillas, no cerveza – and hey! no stomach upset. She held firm during a recent hospital visit. One day, I found her defiantly picking turkey out of the sandwich the hospital cafeteria sent her.

My two sisters are finding that they’re healthier, and so are my nephews and brothers-in-law, when sugar, grains, and dairy aren’t in their cupboards. My little nephews eat smoked salmon and fruit for breakfast. Yes, even the four-year-old. He knows the words “frittata” and “sashimi”. I swear this is true.

Anyway, so, it’s two weeks before Easter. Mom emails me, mildly panicked. It’s her turn to host the big family dinner. She’s gotta feed all of us on the Paleo spectrum along with the more conventionally-minded relatives.

Help! What do I make?

As it happens, I have just the thing. Enter Sarah Fragoso and Everyday Paleo.

A mother of three children ranging from 3 to 15, Fragoso created EverydayPaleo.com as a way to keep herself accountable, to try out new recipes, and to build a community of Paleo-style eaters trying to figure out how to implement this way of eating into their (imperfect) daily routines.

Let’s be honest: Few of us want to spend our lives eating out of coolers from carefully measured Tupperware. We have jobs, lives, families, hobbies, commutes, and other demands on our time. How do we eat well, make food that tastes good, and just get our culinary act together… every day?

As the impromptu “head cook and bottle washer” at NorCal Strength & Conditioning, where Fragoso works alongside Robb Wolf and wife Nicki Violetti, she found herself answering more and more questions about how busy parents (and people in general) could make healthy and delicious meals from whole, unprocessed foods. Eventually, she said, “I could either spend three hours after each workout answering people’s cooking questions, or I could just put up a blog.”

The blog was wildly popular, and eventually she got a call from a publisher. The result: Everyday  Paleo, the book.

It’s part cookbook, part life story, part workout guide (there are even workouts for kids, demonstrated by Fragoso’s little ones, and partner workouts, for which Fragoso’s chiropractor husband joins her – demonstrating proper spinal position, of course).

Fragoso offers dozens of easy-to-prepare dishes that are quick, convenient, and tasty. (And many, dear readers, that involve bacon.) Each recipe has a photograph and clear instructions – and often, the instructions are as simple as “Combine all ingredients in a bowl and serve”.

Yep, it’s just that simple. One of Fragoso’s favourite meals is a simple roast chicken and veggies, although she tells me she loves her slow cooker too.

This all sounded too good to be true, so I got on the phone with the former stay-at-home mom turned strength & conditioning coach.

Fragoso, consider yourself grilled!

How did all this come about?

Originally, I started out as a client at NorCal Strength & Conditioning. I’d had lots of health issues and put on a lot of weight when I was pregnant… and then after I was pregnant. After you have a child, people like to bring you food, so I kind of holed up in my house and ate pasta and bread for 3 months straight.

Plus In my late 20s and early 30s, I had weird stuff happening that I just assumed was normal, because everyone else seemed to have similar complaints and not think it was very strange. I had chronic headaches when I got my period, which ballooned into migraines when I was pregnant. Girl stuff – every month I’d get a yeast infection.

I had chronic swelling in my legs, which I thought was hormonal. Eventually I found out my kidneys weren’t working – I had the initial stages of kidney failure.

But mostly I just lived with it. I figured it was normal.

Once I started at NorCal, I was hooked right away. Eventually, I was hanging around so much, I got hired!

For me, the decision to eat Paleo-style was cold turkey. Three weeks after I started, the leg swelling was gone, and it never came back. Headaches went away. I never had another yeast infection.

You must feel like a new person.

Omigosh! I’m so thankful I took “before” pictures!

Looking at my face, seeing the difference in who I am, it’s unreal. mentally, physically, all of it.

Why a book?

I love to write, it’s my therapy and passion. I have a psychology degree and minored in English, so it’s all stuff I love to do anyway. I decided I’ll just start writing and see what happens.

It’s really just luck and putting it out there in the universe. Writing what I wanted to write about. It just all kind of happened. Honestly I’m still reeling from it!

You’re a parent. Tell me about what that’s like – how did you get your family to get on board with you when you changed your eating?

I have been there, with poor diets. I have so much empathy. I’ve totally lived it. I got into such an unhealthy rut, trying to take care of everyone else first.

I mean, it’s already a challenge at dinner, just to get kids to sit down and even be interested in eating in the first place.

Early on as a parent, before I switched, I knew what foods I could get them to eat. It was stuff like macaroni and cheese, or breaded chicken. I had these comfort go-to food items, that I knew I could prep quickly. As parents we feel if we see kids putting food in their mouths, eating what’s on their plate, it’s like, “Mission accomplished, they’re not going to starve.”

Well, initially when you change, it’s not going to look like that any more. Kids won’t want to eat the new healthy foods right away. It was scary for me to think I was depriving them somehow, making them upset, traumatizing them, punishing them with food changes.

But I just felt so much better when I switched to the new style of eating, I just decided if I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna do it. It wasn’t gradual. It was like, “Hey kids, guess what, all the food we eat is no longer in the house.” I was just that confident about how much better I felt from changing my own diet.

Plus, I started realizing that all these health nuisances my kids were having were nutritional. If I can fix those health problems, it’s worth a few days of whining.

And you know what – it wasn’t as  horrible or scary as I assumed it would be. It’s not as bad as you think it’s going to be, even with picky eaters. There are some secrets.

Oh yeah? Like what?

My number 1 secret is to let them help you in the kitchen. It sounds like it’s almost too good to be true. It’s so amazingly simple. But it plays into the basic psychology of how a child works.

They have basic needs: love, attention, self-actualization, they need responsibility, praise, and of course shelter, food, and clothing. If they have all that other stuff they’ll eat and will be happy and okay.

You have to let them know they’re needed. Part of what they need to help you with is prepping your food. We’ve gotten into this mindset where everything is just handed to us. I know it makes me sound so old to say this, but the younger generation doesn’t realize you have to work to eat.

When your kid sits on the counter with you, and you give them a job and make them feel important, and don’t focus on the fact that you’re prepping broccoli and chicken – if you have them choose the spices and stir it, get excited about what they do, and make a big fuss over what they’ve accomplished… well, it’s amazing what kids will do if you let them help you.

I try to get them excited about making food with me. And sometimes I just put the oldest in charge of dinner.

Now my kids will even eat menudo – and they know what it is, too.

You make it sound pretty easy.

Of course, sometimes it is a struggle. I try and keep things in perspective. I feel so lucky just to have healthy kids and a happy marriage.

A few years ago when I wasn’t as healthy, it was a struggle in that I was working so hard just to maintain my own energy level. It was so much harder to have motivation to take care of my family.

The lesson is really that I need to take care of myself first. I used to think that was selfish. Now, being older and wiser, having things happen, like losing my mom to cancer, I’ve realized that if I don’t care for me first, then the challenges of taking care of everyone else are so much bigger.

It’s still challenging, and at the end of the day I’m tired, but I enjoy it so much more, just because I feel better. I think it’s just really about taking a deep breath, stepping back, and seeing what we do have and how blessed we are.

We get so focused on all the stuff we have to do. We all lose sight of how great parenting is.

What was the process of transition like? Were there challenges?

In the beginning, I really struggled for the first few weeks to find balance.

I’d eat healthily during the week, then gorge myself on Sunday. That’s kind of a popular approach right now to a lowcarb diet, to do that. It made me super-neurotic and unhealthy. It’s not great for you physically either.

It felt wrong and weird, like I was in some sort of strange relationship with food. I’d be all snuggly with my healthy foods during the week, and then ditch them on the weekend for cookies and donuts.

I associated cheating with all kinds of negative things. Eventually I threw that mindset to the side and lived my life more naturally.

I figured out what I could eat that wasn’t Paleo and still made me feel okay. For example, I can have nachos – corn  chips are okay and I feel fine eating them, but if I have anything with gluten, I’m sick the whole next day.

So, the challenge was really to figure out how to live a natural lifestyle without feeling I was missing out on something. I really had to change my outlook and perspective. Instead of feeling deprived, I learned to enjoy what I was eating.

Sugar is addictive. What it does to us psychologically is so crazy and weird. Just getting through the first month of avoiding all crap food helped me stabilize mentally and physically, so I could say, “This is just how I eat”. That helped me get past the difficulty.

We can’t control many things in our lives, but we can control what we do to our bodies with exercise, food, whatever. It’s good in some ways to have that kind of control, but you have to figure out what’s healthy within that control. How do we balance that? Is there any such thing as balance? I don’t want to spend my life on a tightrope. I like having my feet on solid ground.

For me, I just take one meal at a time. If we start looking too far into the future, we get so spun out. “Oh, I can’t eat Aunt Berta’s apple cake when Christmas comes…” We get lost in the future, and how’s this all going to work out and be. Just focus on today. Worrying is the worst thing you can do about anything.

The other thing that’s important is the food in your house.

So many parents say, okay, I’m committed, and then keep the box of cereal stashed in the cupboard, or the box of Pop Tarts. I know from experience that when you’re in a rush, when you’re tired, when you have a crying whiny child, as a parent you will give in, if you have that stash.

It starts that vicious cycle, where your kid knows if they throw a fit and whine, they’ll get their cereal back. Kids are smart. They’ll play you like a fool. [laughs]

Parents have to be tough but understanding. Like anything else in life, if your kid cries every time you’re in the store and you give that child a toy, they’ll cry all the time.

So just don’t have unhealthy food in the house. When the child asks, you gently say, “I’m sorry, we don’t have that any more, but we have this other thing.” Then offer them a healthy choice.

They might not take that healthy choice immediately, but they won’t starve. Just keep with the approach of getting them on board. It’s super important that you don’t have food in the house if you don’t want to eat it.

Even me, if I have wine and dark chocolate in my house at 10 pm and I’m tired and stressed out, then I’ll have wine and dark chocolate. But if it’s not here, then I don’t miss it.

It’s really about self regulating by not having it there. There’s no such thing as willpower.

Where do you get your recipe ideas?

I grew up on a farm. My mom was a health nut, she was a vegetarian on and off for years. I was kind of used to that, the concept of cooking your food in order to eat it.

As an adult, though, I got out of that. I felt I was too busy. I had excuses. I looked for convenience.

When I changed my eating, I realized I had to get creative again. Most people, when they hear “meat and vegetables”, think salad. Or they think about chicken breast and steamed broccoli.

I had to pull from my roots and go back to when I was in the kitchen with my mom, and think about how she’d create these dishes. She was always in the kitchen, trying something new. That was instilled in me.

I love to travel, and I’ve definitely had my fair share of trying new cuisines. Plus, my husband is Filipino and Latino, so we have all those flavours and recipes from his side of the family.

But the great thing is, it’s hard to mess up meat and vegetables, unless you do something crazy! We did feed a couple of things to the dog, though. [laughs]

It really doesn’t have to be boring. I enjoy my food so much more now than I used to. It’s exciting for me.

Our family favourite is my meatloaf, which I used to hate growing up. My mom would make something like a brick with ketchup on top. My husband suggested I try making a Paleo meatloaf, so I make one with fresh basil and onion. No ketchup on top. It’s one of our family’s go-to meals. We also make a great Thai curry soup.

And of course, lots of things with bacon!

What do you tell people when they ask about how you eat?

When people hear “Paleo”, they think I’m on some weird diet or crazy enough to have my kids on some weird diet. What we say is that we avoid processed foods. That’s all it is. Even a loaf of bread, think about how highly processed that is.

So, when I say I avoid processed foods, people understand that that’s healthy.

What’s your favourite recipe in the book?

I can’t really pick my favourite recipe. I’m not picky. I love to eat! I’m just happy as long as I’m full!

By the way, here’s mom’s Easter menu. Fragoso would approve. And as you can see, nobody starved.

Prosciutto
Olives
Fresh veggies
Pickled veggies

Beet-cranberry soup (with coconut milk instead of sour cream)

Roast lamb
Roast chicken
Braised Brussels sprouts and apples
Roasted yams and peppers
Whipped butternut squash
Steamed asparagus

Everyday Paleo berry cobbler
Everyday Paleo pumpkin pie
Date-coconut balls
Fresh fruit

Interview with Robb Wolf (55 min; right-click to download in mp3 format)

I don’t know about the rest of you, but some time in the last few years I hit a serious state of diet fatigue. It all seemed so… complicated. X grams of carbs after training, Y grams of protein x Z lb of body weight per day. Is coffee good or bad for me? Should I eat at night or in the morning?

When the hell did eating become brain surgery? (Possible smartass answer: When you become a zombie.)

Ask the average person what to eat and when, and their eyes will glaze over. Facial tics and twitching will appear. The consumer-on-the-street simply cannot make sense of the conflicting, cryptic, often overblown nutritional advice (eggs are worse than a Double Down! soy is good! no, wait, soy is Satan!) that appears in the mainstream media.

And no surprise. Much of what we “know” to be “good nutrition” is purposely misleading. Researchers such as Marion Nestle have busted the nutritional cabal of Big Ag food producers and agencies such as the USDA. These days, “healthy” food recommendations and much of clinical research have a lot more to do with the needs of the commercial food production and processing industries than with actual human needs. In other words, the diet advice you read probably came from the marketing department of an agricultural or retail consortium… and won’t make you any healthier.

Ever wonder why all of a sudden we’re being told to eat hydrogenated, bleached, rancid vegetable oils (aka margarine) instead of butter, and that machine-extruded, nutrient-stripped cereals and pesticide-laden, chemically reconstituted orange juice are part of a healthy breakfast? Eggs are the least of our problems when we’re chowing down Nutella smeared on white flour bagels, feeling smug because we’re eating “an important serving of dairy and grains”.

How did it all go so wrong? It’s understandable to yearn for the good old days when food was anything you smacked in the head or nibbled from a tree branch. Understandable… and luckily, says researcher Robb Wolf, a pretty smart idea.

A couple hundred years ago, scientists were stumped by what appeared to be nature’s randomness. Steam-powered travel and global exploration were offering all kinds of strange things to researchers.  Biology was still a bit of a bastard discipline. Specimens from all over the world, when brought back to home shores, prompted head-scratching.

Gee, these apes sorta look like people! (Ha ha! I betcha it’d be hilarious to put a chimp in a sailor suit!) Why don’t pineapples grow in England? What the hell is this platypus thing? Seriously, what is that about?

In its thoughtful, world-changing (and the time, shocking) description of Nature’s semi-random master plan, Darwin’s Origin of Species offered an elegant, basic solution to the puzzling weirdness of biology. Organisms adapt to their environment. Over time, those organisms change.

Nearly two centuries of scientific investigation and one discovery of DNA later, evolution is still a pretty darn good theory. (We’re all lucky that Darwin didn’t follow his father’s advice to become an accountant.)

So here’s the deal: No matter how many iPods you own, and despite your corneal lens implants, evolution applies to us too. And in terms of how we evolved to eat and live, we aren’t too far from naked apes (also possibly hilarious in sailor suits).

It ain’t glamorous. We evolved as omnivorous scavengers. That means we probably ate bugs or a lion’s semi-funky carcass leftovers as often as we ate the proverbial mammoth filet mignon.

But the point remains: We evolved in a natural environment. We are no longer eating and living as if we were in that natural environment. Our physiology hasn’t caught up to this new situation. Problems ensue: heart disease, diabetes, stress, cancer, and other chronic health conditions.

Thanks to the research of folks like Loren Cordain, Art DeVany, Staffan Lindberg, and now Robb Wolf, we’ve realized that, as Blur sang, modern life is rubbish. Our bodies haven’t kept pace with modern diets, and we’re getting fatter, weaker, and sicker as a result.

Luckily, like Darwin’s theory, the solution — as Wolf outlines in his book — is simple. The idea of ancestral diets offers a gentle, palate-cleansing sorbet of clarity to nutritional debates: WWCE? What would a cavewoman eat?

Riffing on Dan John’s “meat, leaves, and berries” concept, cavewomen are simple creatures. They’d eat whatever they could kill, dig out of the ground, or pluck from a shrub or tree. They would NOT eat the foods that form the basis of our 21st century diet: sugar, grains, dairy, and beans/legumes. And Splenda? Diet Coke? Gummibears? C’mon.

Wolf’s CV is impressive. He’s a former research biochemist and review editor for the Journal of Nutrition and Metabolism, is co-founder of the nutrition and athletic training journal The Performance Menu, co-owner of NorCal Strength & Conditioning, one of the Men’s Health “top 30 gyms in America”. He’s also a former California State Powerlifting Champion (565 lb. squat, 345 lb. bench, 565 lb. deadlift) and a 6-0 amateur kickboxer. He coaches athletes at the highest levels of competition and consults with Olympians and world champions in MMA, motocross, rowing and triathlon. He’s provided seminars in nutrition and strength & conditioning to various military entities including the Canadian Light Infantry and the United States Marine Corps.

Wolf is a voracious and wide-ranging researcher and a hell of a funny guy. (Ladies, if you like your men smart and buff, look no further than this poster boy for geeks gone swole.) And he believes fervently in the power of ancestral diets to help real people feel, look, and perform better.

But it’s not just his belief. Studies of indigenous populations worldwide, from the South Pacific to the Arctic, confirm that when people live on ancestral diets, they live long and surprisingly healthy lives free of the chronic diseases that we now take for granted. (Although as Wolf notes, “our ancestors lived a rough and tumble existence that left their skeletons looking like equal parts Olympic athlete and rodeo clown”.)

The Paleo Solution is a meticulously researched, coherently argued, and occasionally sphincter-looseningly witty book. Wolf guides the reader gently through the basics of metabolic derangement that accompanies a standard Western diet, explains the chemical mechanisms by which Paleo-style/ancestral diets work, and occasionally brings out the big guns on faddish modern dietary foolishness with bon mots such as: “If you do not sleep you will completely cock-block your fat loss.”

Whether it’s sleep, sex, sunlight, or how to make a NorCal margarita, no element of modern life nor oversight of nutritional science is spared in Wolf’s unflinching analysis (including the great philosophical question, “Won’t my bum forget how to poop without grains?”).  He offers sections on how to exercise (run fast for short times, lift heavy stuff, and amble or scamper), how to understand your bloodwork, and what to make for a daily menu.

Guess what: You already know how to eat Paleo. Ever had a salad with chicken on it? Ever had an omelet with veggies? Ever had a steak with grilled veggies? Perfect. You’re well on your way. However, Wolf also provides lots of handy tips about how to make the eating plan work.

Bottom line, he says: Try it.

Try it, it works. Try it like you’d try on a sweater. Give it a shot — full-on, no screwing around with gluten-free bread or sneaking in some spelt cakes — for 30 days and see how you look, feel, and perform. All you have to lose is a month of familiar foods and habits. All you have to gain is pain-free, inflammation-free living. And maybe seeing your abs.

I confess: I’m a believer. I have seen what this way of eating can do. It’s elegantly simple, just like Darwin intended. It works. My allergies and eczema? Gone. Joint pain? Gone. Skin? Clear. Digestion? Like clockwork. Hair? Bouncin’ and behavin’ — and growing so fast it’s becoming a bit of a drag to book haircuts so often.

So, Stumpfans, I challenge you: Check out Wolf’s book. Listen to his podcasts. Download the free stuff such as the Quick Start Guide on his website. Give this way of eating a shot for 30 days and let us know what YOU experience.

Stumptuous interview with Frank Forencich (right-click to download in mp3 format)

“Exuberant animal” is one of the best phrases I have ever heard to sum up a holistic approach to movement and wellness.

Animals, like us, live and die within a complex ecological and social context. Animals, like us, are their context — their bodies, as ours do, respond to light-dark, seasons, temperatures, and other environmental conditions. Animals, like us, are born with innate knowledge and instincts, and a finely tuned set of biological systems that depend on close interaction with the natural world.

Exuberance implies joy, play, and a zest for existence.

Likewise, Frank Forencich’s Exuberant Animal approach captures the best elements of being an animal — the pure, physically experienced joy of life, health, and movement.

I first heard of Forencich’s approach when I stumbled across a ruthlessly brilliant EA blog post decrying what I call the fitness-industrial complex, or the mainstream commercial fitness industry, which has become increasingly preoccupied with narcissistic, fragmented, isolationist pursuits such as “6 packs” and “core training”.

Forencich adroitly captures the nihilistic, authoritarian, quasi-militaristic nature of the modern fitness industry, and leaves one wondering why anyone but a total masochist would willingly participate in such an endeavour. Indeed, I recall a moment of similar existential horror: looking out on to a commercial gym floor and observing 15 parallel treadmills, each with its occupant plugged in to a headset, staring at a bank of parallel televisions.

No wonder nobody wants to go to the gym.

Artwork by Allison Wells, Papersnake.ca

How did we somehow stumble off the savannah on to a moving belt a few feet long and constrained by railings, our attention fixed on the hypnotic blinky lights, bowing to the deity of calorie burn?

“Treadmills are boredom machines,” says Forencich in his new book, Change Your Body, Change the World, and our “somatic senses” (our physical experiences such as temperature, position, movement, pain etc.) have atrophied in overly-comfortable environments where we stare straight ahead into the picture box. We barely need to move our feet; a mechanized device will handle that job for us.

“Movement deprivation is also a form of sensory deprivation,” argues Forencich, and “sensory deprivation is widely recognized as a serious challenge to psychological well-being… by living sedentary lives of sensory deprivation, we effectively torture ourselves.”

We have mechanoreceptors — neurons that sense pressure/touch, movement, position in space, pain, temperature, etc. — throughout our entire body, and these are stimulated by movement. Thus, when we do not move, our senses work less. When we inhabit unchanging, controlled environments, we gather no new physical input. We become floating heads. This has serious consequences.

“Without a sense of body,” says Forencich, “our minds and spirits begin to wander.” Conversely, “the more we move, the more information we gather, and the more integrated our bodymind begins to feel.”

Forencich’s premise is simple, yet elegant. We evolved to be complex, interconnected beings who respond dynamically to our environments, each other, and the natural world. We, like our ancestors, are wired for response, for movement, and for play. We are not a brain in a container: We are our bodies, and our bodies are us. Moreover, our bodies exist in a social and environmental context — we are walking ecosystems embedded in other ecosystems, food chains layered on food chains. We are we rather than me.

The more we strive for isolation, the more ill we become. The more we separate ourselves from our natural environment and from one another, and the more we fragment our experiences and bodies into “parts”, the worse off we are.

It’s hardly a coincidence that we’re experiencing chronic ill health when we are poisoning our environment… and at a time in human history when we should — healthwise at least — be feeling invincible. We’ve figured out sanitation and surgery, so why the hell are we still so sick and depressed?

One clue, says Forencich, lies in the divorce of our physical bodies from our natural worlds, and our cognition from our somatic senses. If you think of a time when you felt most nourished, exuberant, alive, and positive in your body, it was probably some moment when all your senses were working together in harmony with your natural physical abilities — perhaps hurtling along on your bike with the wind in your face, or hiking a trail, or playing in the surf. You were flowing — experiencing what Forencich terms zanshin. You were feeling and sensing and thinking, together instantaneously. You certainly weren’t worrying about your 6-pack.

Thus, in order to achieve optimal health, we have to understand two key ideas:

1. We are ancient bodies in a modern — alien — context.
2. We are connected: within our bodies, to each other, and to the land/environment.

Therefore:

1. Ill-health and malaise stem from mismatch between our ancient bodies and our modern world.
2. We can, through joyful and primal movement choices, through connecting to one another and the land/environment, re-acquaint ourselves with our “exuberant animal” powers.

To many of you, this undoubtedly sounds a bit woo-woo. Maybe you envision some kind of cheesy hippie orgy, or a call to return to an imaginary primal harmony when cavepeople held hands and sang to the Grateful Dead and bongo drums. However, Forencich’s claims are based in sound science.

For instance, the field of psychoneuroendocrinology explores the relationships between our environment, our hormones, and our cognitive-emotional states. Chronic stress, for example, fundamentally “rewires” neurological and hormonal connections. We put ourselves under chronic physical stress by eating fake food, by smoking, by forcing our bodies into schedules that conflict with natural light-dark cycles, by remaining immobile for long periods of time. These effects are real and measurable. Yet recent studies demonstrate that simply getting out into more natural environments (such as a park) and being physical can reverse these deleterious effects — the more we walk, the smarter we get.

And Forencich isn’t going to take away your iPod just yet, though he’d probably argue that you should try to leave it at home more often. When was the last time, after all, that you listened to things in your surroundings that weren’t aural assaults? Close your eyes for a few seconds as you walk — notice how other senses immediately jump to be more relevant? Hear those birds that you were ignoring a few moments ago? Feel that breeze?

One of the core concepts of EA is joy — joy in our birthright of movement. We all have this birthright. We all know how to play, though many of us have forgotten. We are born with movement in our bodies. (Ever seen a baby dance? Hilarious, and informative.) Movement is not a chore, or an obligation. It is who we are and what we do.

Forencich’s prose is beautiful, simple, and compelling. Change Your Body, Change the World is both an argument against a fitness-industrial complex who has tried to steal our playfulness and physical selves, and an argument for embracing the richness of human experience as the foundation of our physical practice.

Podcast with Cassandra Forsythe

Book review

If there’s a woman in your life who’s considering weight training (or a man in your life who trains women), The New Rules of Lifting for Women is an excellent introduction to the field of women and weight training.

NROL is written by a kickass trifecta of three major names in the business.

Lou Schuler is a well-known fitness journalist who has written several books, including The New Rules of Lifting, The Book of Muscle, and The Home Workout Bible. He’s been a contributor to Men’s Fitness and Men’s Health, serving as the fitness director of the latter for several years.

Cassandra Forsythe is emerging as one of the most authoritative voices in women’s nutrition and training. She’s a Registered Dietitian who holds a PhD in Kinesiology, an MSc in Human Nutrition and Metabolism and a BSc in Nutrition and Food Science. Her main research interests are low-carbohydrate nutrition, dietary fatty acids, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, weight-loss, female-specific nutrition and training, and the female athlete triad. Her other book is Women’s Health Perfect Body Diet: The Ultimate Weight Loss and Workout Plan to Drop Stubborn Pounds and Get Fit for Life

(She’s also, by the way, pregnant. We explore her insights on being an unusual combination — a serious female athlete, Dr. Nutrition, and pregnant — in the podcast.)

Alwyn Cosgrove is one of the best-known strength coaches in the biz. He’s a former Taekwon-do international champion who now works as a strength and conditioning coach with a wide variety of clientele, including several Olympic and national level athletes, five World Champions and professionals in a multitude of sports including boxing, martial arts, soccer, ice skating, football, fencing, triathlon, rugby, bodybuilding, dance and fitness competition.

Podcast with Cassandra Forsythe

Cassandra and I get chatty with it for nearly an hour. Topics covered:

• What was it like to be part of the NROL team with Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove?
• The awesomeness of
  • female muscles and strength
  • mountain biking
  • tire flipping
• Cassandra’s early background as a gymnast and lifting after a serious spinal injury
• What happens to women’s bodies when they weight train
• Training with dudes in the gym
• Challenges encountered in training more seriously, and confronting taboos about women’s weight training
• Problems in finding social support (especially from other women), and why push presses aren’t necessarily compatible with bridesmaid’s dresses
• Disordered eating and “exercise bulimia” among “ordinary” women — “healthy” and “unhealthy” approaches to exercise and food
• The female athlete triad
• The myth and pressures of “perfection” and the reality of being an “imperfect expert”
• The role of stress in women’s lives and why we need to lighten the hell up
• Pregnancy, nutrition, and weight training — including sugar cravings, boot camp, and log pressing while pregnant
• The up-and-coming areas for women’s nutrition and fitness
• What’s wrong with kids these days

As Cassandra points out, it’s unusual to have a podcast with two women weight trainers chatting so honestly about the realities of training and bodily experiences. But that’s just the kind of good stuff that Stumptuous.com is devoted to bringing to the people!

Listen online by clicking below:

Or download in MP3 format for good listenin’ on your iPod. (65 MB – yeah, it’s a biggie!) Right-click on the link, if you want to save to your hard drive first (recommended).

Book review

As I’ve mentioned, NROL is a super introduction to the field of women and weight training, and it’s solidly backed by coaching experience and scholarly evidence.

This would make a great gift for your mom, sister, girlfriend/wife, best friend, etc. — anyone who’s considering weight training but hesitant about whether women should do it. It would also make a great gift for folks who may know their way around the gym a little, but want to become more grounded in some of the fundamental principles of program design and sports nutrition.

The first section of the book provides a primer on sex-based physiology, and why women and men should train the same: with relatively heavier weights, higher intensities, and more challenge overall.

The first section debunks common myths — most notably that women will “get too big” from weight training; that certain types of training can make muscles “longer”‘; and a key point: the myth that men’s and women’s muscles are substantially different.

It explains why weight training is essential for all women, not just athletes, and how weight training improves health, leanness, athletic performance, and daily-life function.

The first section also explains much of the logic behind the training plans provided: the importance of progressive overload, which exercises to choose and why, and why not to waste your time with gender-specific “toning”. (It explains why kickbacks suck. Hooray!)

The second section provides nutrition basics such as how many calories active women need, why protein’s important, and how to supplement with post-workout recovery nutrition. It suggests meal plan and preparation techniques, and there’s no fancy weird stuff or secret/magical ingredients — just clear, basic ideas for organizing your nutrition.

The third section provides a step-by-step, carefully crafted workout program in great detail. If you follow the program closely (and you should, if you want to reap the benefits), it’ll take around 6 months to complete. The lifts are basic yet effective. There’s lots of variation to keep you learning and interested.

Total beginners might be slightly intimidated by the presence of complex exercises such as squats and deadlifts — but hey, they can just come here and get help figuring out the technique!

All in all, this is a super starter text for anyone interested in women’s weight training.

As an oldest sister myself, I always wanted someone to look up to — someone who’d tell me the real deal about men, women, periods, getting into shape, being my own best friend, and how to dress myself. She’d be compassionate and encouraging, but honest. She wouldn’t let me get away with BS, but she’d always be in my corner.

Strength trainer Rachel Cosgrove is that woman to her clients.

Along with Mr. Rachel Cosgrove, aka some guy named Alwyn whom nobody in the strength training field has ever heard of, she runs Results Fitness in California. And let me tell you, it’s a pretty special gym.

Walk into Results on any day of the week and you’ll behold a room full of women lifting heavy — women squatting, deadlifting, Olympic weightlifting, bashing out sets of kettlebell swings or sandbag lifts, hauling shipping ropes or in other ways having their asses kicked.

This is unusual in and of itself, but even more unusual is that the majority of these women are “plain folks” of all ages, leaning more towards the “office worker” than the “WNBA player” or “superninja” end of the spectrum. Truly, it is spectacular.

Now Cosgrove has encapsulated her generous but firm approach into a wonderfully comprehensive book on women’s training and nutrition.

It’s always refreshing to read something that encourages women to train heavy and hard, as well as to nourish themselves adequately.

Cosgrove explains why the traditional women’s magazine fitness and nutrition “advice” (lift light, do lots of toning reps, do cardio till your feet fall off, live on 1200 calories of rice cakes, etc.) sucks, and her clients’ results speak for themselves. Moreover, Cosgrove provides her own experience to demonstrate that hours of low-intensity cardio don’t do — pardon the pun — jack squat.

But aside from good advice, Cosgrove gets into female-specific concerns, devoting large sections to periods, PMS, life stresses (e.g. child care), etc. This is sorely needed now that women are training seriously more than ever and need good guidance about how to address their natural hormonal fluctuations and physiological considerations — particularly in a fashion that is not condescending or dismissive. Cosgrove addresses biomechanical problems common to women, such as quad dominance, poor core stability, and the consequences of wearing high heels.

More unusual, Cosgrove tackles women’s “horizontal hostility” — aka backbiting, sniping, and/or self deprecation — head-on. “End body bashing,” she writes, celebrate your accomplishments, and don’t be a crab in the bucket. In other words, don’t pull other women down just to make yourself feel better. Don’t focus on perceived “flaws”; help yourself and other women develop strengths. It’s a uniquely collective, chick-positive approach in an industry that is often “every woman for herself”.

Cosgrove’s Fit Female Credo

1. Act as if you are a fit female.
2. Get out of your comfort zone.
3. Fuel your body to be fabulous!
4. Train hard or go home.
5. Get hooked on feeling fit, not a number on the scale.
6. Be an early riser.
7. Make rest, relaxation & regeneration a priority.
8. Obstacles will arise — anticipate them!
9. Keep a journal or a blog.
10. Eliminate the negative people known as crabs and surround yourself with positive people.
11. Think about your thoughts.
12. Attitude is everything.
13. Manage your stress.
14. Put an end to body bashing and instead celebrate your strengths.
15. Don’t rely on will power. Have strategies.
16. Stop rationalizing and making excuses.

What distinguishes this book stylistically is its clarity of voice. It’s well-structured, easy to follow, and above all, honest and forthright.

Cosgrove recounts her own struggles with body weight/fat and eating, describing her journey from cardio queen through triathlete through fitness model, and finally arriving at a place where she felt productive and satisfied. This is not a perky, post-adolescent, surgically produced cheerleader but a real woman, warts and all, dealing with Thanksgiving dinners and life stress and love handles and injuries, just like the rest of us.

And throughout the book we meet the other real women who are Cosgrove’s clients, everyone from Gerry (pictured here) to Lori, who writes poignantly:

“I can look at a photo album of myself over the past 20 years and in the photos where I am overweight and out of shape were also the times in my life when I did not have control of my life. Such a time was this past year when my life went spiraling out of control. Along with the spiral came the pounds. True, I had just had a baby (no easy feat at my age, 42) and true I had just been through a traumatic relationship with an abusive alcoholic. After going through days and weeks where I was so depressed I could barely get out of bed (only to care for my newborn, to eat, or to use the bathroom), I had finally had enough. I did what I always did when my life had tilted too far: I got back in shape… Not only did I physically get into shape, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually followed like stepping stones.”

Oh yes, and apparently Cosgrove knows the secret to getting a fantastic ass. What is it? Well, you’ll just have to read it and see! Thank me for the recommendation when your glutes are like two springy cantaloupes!

Also check out the interview/podcast I did with Lierre about her experiences on PrecisionNutrition.com!

Yet I am also an omnivore who struggles with the ethical questions of where food comes from and how it gets to me. I am a person who cares for others — both human and non-human — and a person who abhors oppression, violence (OK, at least the nonconsensual kind), and corporate degradation of our food quality and moral responsibilities (both to one another and to the living creatures we consume).

I am repulsed by the alienation that the industrial food production system has engendered. I am distressed that so many of my peers do not know what Brussels sprouts look like in the wild, or that they think meat comes in square packages.

And I am, quite frankly, pant-wettingly-scared about the ecological apocalypse that surely awaits us after pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers, and the obliteration of biodiversity and natural life cycles via genetic modification of monoculture crops (including sterilized seeds) have had their way with the planet.

And yet, an omnivore I remain.

How, then, do I eat ethically?

Perhaps at no other time in history have we been so preoccupied with such questions of food ethics.

While various faiths have developed assorted food rules concerning preparation and consumption for thousands of years, most folks were nevertheless more concerned with the question of having enough to eat. The question of what to eat was generally secondary. And the question of why we eat was probably not on the table at all.

For the average person five hundred years ago, a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou was pretty much as good as it got. Now here we are, munching our way into the 21st century, idly contemplating more existential questions as we stuff our gob.

For some people, such issues are not so idle. Rather, for conscious eaters, these questions strike at the heart of what it means to be an ethically acting individual. Or how to live in good health. Or how to care for the environment.

Lierre Keith has tackled all of these questions throughout her life. Like many people, she assumed that being vegan was a good way to implement her desire to care for her health, animals, and the environment. She diligently followed a vegan lifestyle for two decades.

Then, she writes, her body gave out. Wracked with pain from a degenerative spinal condition; with insulin whiplash; with depression and cognitive problems; and with plain old hunger — all of which, she says, were caused by twenty years of self-imposed malnutrtition in the name of ethical eating — she knew she had to change.

At first, she denied the evidence. Like Fox Mulder from the X-Files, she wanted to believe: that her choices were leading to a more just world, and a more sound body. Eventually, however, the cracks in this worldview turned into chasms.

Her epiphany came in two parts: an episode of somnambulist euphoria involving a dish of sour cream, and a desperate moment of shame and fear when a kindly Chinese medical doctor informed her with gentle sadness that she had no chi. Her life force, she writes, was ebbing away. (I actually cried while reading this part.)

And thus, also like many people (who are often less inclined to discuss the transition publicly), she began eating meat again. The decision resulted in a slow climb back to (partial) health,  but filled her with such angst that she set out on a quest to reconcile her new dietary choices with her worldview.

The result is a stunning, profound, beautiful book.

Keith’s writing is superb: clear, authentic, and honest. She builds her case with skillful prose and powerful vignettes that offer glimpses into her old and new lives. She hides little, it seems: we follow her digestive challenges, her bleak and bedridden depression, her existential struggles, and her adventures in chicken-raising.

Such vignettes, alternately heart-wrenching and hilarious (including a deeply funny attempt to release garden snails into the wild rather than harm them), are set against a backdrop of some of the liveliest science writing since Carl Sagan.

Readers with specialized formal expertise in biological sciences may take issue with the nuances of some of Keith’s data or scientific claims, but anyone with a scientific bent will appreciate Keith’s joy and wonderment at discovering the fascinating natural world. Her journey spans soil biology, microbiology, plant chemistry and communication, ecology, agricultural science, nutrition, physiology, neuroimmunology, and global political struggles.

Throughout these voyages, Keith develops her argument: that a plant-based monoculture of a handful of crops (e.g. wheat, soy, and corn) has actively harmed us, other living organisms, and the delicate balance of ecosystems. Such monocultures not only contravene the rules of biodiversity in the natural world, but also provide opportunities for corporate control of food systems.

Furthermore, evolutionarily speaking, these monocultures do not produce the foods that evolution intended us to eat. Emerging research indeed suggests that a grain-based diet does us few favours:

• antinutrients in grains inhibit proper vitamin and mineral absorption;
• gliadin, lectins, and other inflammation-causing proteins eat their way through our guts;
• opioid compounds in wheat activate similar brain pathways as addictive drugs and trigger us to overconsume; and so forth.

Moreover, soy has moved from an industrial waste product to an industrial waste product with a genius PR team. (For more on this, see Kaayla Daniel’s work and our interview with her in Vol 6 of Spezzatino magazine.) Plant-based eaters who consume soy as a “healthy” staple/meat alternative risk serious health consequences, especially when consuming soy in significant amounts (as with soy milk, tofurkey, and the like).

Thus, she argues, by embracing and promoting an entirely plant-based lifestyle, well-meaning vegetarians inadvertently (and ironically) create a situation that is unsustainable, unhealthy, inappropriate for local ecosystems (e.g. attempting to grow prairie crops in regions that are actually forests), dependent on petroleum-based fertilizers and large corporations, and above all, ignorant of how biological systems actually work.

But what of the question of harming animals? Nearly all right-thinking people will agree that factory farming is a scorched blight both on food quality and animal dignity. Very few would argue that such a system has actually made food better, though it has certainly succeeded in turning flesh into a more productive commodity.. It has not made us healthier, nor engaged us more intimately in caring for non-human species.

The industrial food system does not nourish our bodies, our souls, or the land. Quite the opposite: it has produced diseased, distressed animals and a big pile of crap — figuratively (in the form of processed garbage non-food) and literally (in the form of effluent caked on to confined beasts and sprayed into fields of sludge, there to contaminate groundwater and sear the ground beneath it).

Yet does this by extension suggest that eating animals is inherently wrong or immoral? Keith says no.

Death is part of life, she writes. Everything dies. Everything is eaten.

In an interesting intellectual approach, she does not argue that eating meat is more or less “right”, but rather that apprehending the natural world as a complex web of life and death — with death a necessity rather than an awkward, unmentionable, or avoidable outcome — reflects a grown-up view of reality that faces nature’s unpleasant truths head-on. Eventually we have to acknowledge that our goldfish is not sleeping and there is no Santa Claus.

Likewise we have to acknowledge that food is a complex cycle that does not begin with a grocery store. We may be saddened by this reality but it does not go away for wishing.

In addition, Keith points out, what of the non-cute and/or tiny creatures that we must harm in order to facilitate agriculture? We destroy billions of soil biota, insects, and small animals. We drive out birds, rodents, amphibians. We drain wetlands and raze forests. How many bugs equal a cow? How many mice equal an ear of corn?

While it does not form a significant part of the book, Keith points out the links between social oppression and our attitudes towards consumption. These links are not as facile or self-evident as one might think.

Often, a meat dish at a lefty potluck is as welcome as a turd in the punch bowl. I’ve often experienced disparaging comments about my food choices from well-meaning people (which, ironically, is the same thing that happens to vegetarians).

How could I tell such well-meaning folks that the experience of catching my own fish (with another, smaller, fish, as if I needed another reminder of everything being eaten), killing it myself, preparing it with care, and then eating it within a few hours filled me with a more profound sense of wonder and responsibility towards nature’s bounty than any trip to a crunchy health food store would ever accomplish?

I don’t need a course in environmentalism to appreciate the impact of my life choices on other creatures when I am directly involved in the food chain. I don’t need a course in anatomy to know that I should carefully save and cherish each part of this animal whose life I claimed. By implicating ourselves in this cycle, states Keith, we assume true responsibility for others and ourselves.

There is a proverb that says one does not become fat on food that one prays over. I choose to interpret this to mean that when we force ourselves to confront nature red in tooth and claw, to assume responsibility for our place in it, to experience wonderment at its miracles, and to share the harvest in a context of care and joy, we are wiser about what we consume.

Put down the cookie and drop the donut. Hard, isn’t it?

For all of us who’ve ever found ourselves going into autopilot as we spoon peanut butter from the jar at 2 am, or who’ve ever found ourselves staring at the shiny foil bottom of a chip bag wondering what the hell just happened, or who keep their medicine cabinet well-stocked with Pepto-Bismol… this book is for you.

This book is also for the rest of you (who possibly don’t exist) who don’t understand how people can do such silly things. You 1% who claim to be satisfied with a single square of chocolate, listen quietly without interruptions.

If you’re from, say, rural Asia or eastern Africa, walk around any mall in the United States and you’ll be flabbergasted at the flabbitude. It’s a situation unlike any other in human history: the widespread wide-load consequences of abundant overnutrition and sedentary living.

While traveling through the southern US and stopping at a Denny’s, I had the inspiration to make a movie called, simply, Eating. The movie would be a montage of mouths chewing and slurping the vast portions of sugar/fat/chemical-laced slurry that passes for comestibles in North America.

Not surprisingly, the top-selling drug classes in the US are drugs to treat the aftermath of overeating. #1 are gastro-esophageal reflux (GERD) medications, while #2 are statins, which purportedly lower cholesterol, which supposedly is good for us (let’s leave that discussion for another time).

It’s tempting to think that overeating and its symptomatic consequences — obesity, chronic diseases, etc. — represent a failure of individual will. We just eat too fucking much because, well, we are weak. A well-known bodybuilding writer once quipped that he was going to write a very simple diet book called Don’t Eat So Much, You Fat Fuck. (I assume this would go along with Saturday Night Live’s infomercial for a financial management strategy called Don’t Buy Stuff You Can’t Afford.)

But is it really that easy? Are we all just moral weaklings? Lazy? Stupid?

When I was fat, I certainly wasn’t. I tried hard to eat well and get regular activity. And I was in grad school, so my stupidity was debatable. (Probably a different, more masochistic, kind of stupidity. I digress.)

Now that I’m fit, my desire to eat delicious things — way past the point where I should quit — has not gone away. I’m just better at managing the insatiable reward system of the brain, and I avoid many of the foods that trigger the NOM NOM NOM response. But you know what? The Pepto Bismol is still in my medicine cabinet and I’d be lying if I said it was unopened.

So what’s up with the fill ‘er up?

In this insightful book, author David Kessler explores the mechanisms behind overeating. Why do we eat too much? Why do we eat things that we know we shouldn’t? Why do we eat well past the point of satiety — often well into the territory of pain?

Important systems in the brain and body control appetite (the desire to eat), hunger (the physical manifestation of needing food), and satiety (feelings of fullness and satisfaction). These systems have done us very well for millennia.

However, these systems evolved in conditions of food scarcity and irregularity. They evolved when food was high-fibre, often high-protein, and high in naturally occurring “good” fats. And they evolved in conditions where we might have to trek many, many miles to get that food. We evolved to run after beasts, to scoop fish from streams and oceans, to scrabble roots out of the soil, and to pluck tiny berries from bushes as we walked and walked and walked. Sweetness signaled “good to eat” and “fruit”. Salt came from the sea, or from the blood of animals freshly killed.

We did not, in other words, evolve to manage an overstimulating environment replete with artificial fats, mountains of sugar, constipatingly fibreless hunks of gluten, artificially generated scents that remind us of sizzling meat on a grill or fresh strawberries, nor a host of other chemicals that stimulate our reward pathways.

Our brain is wired for the savannah, but it’s getting Dairy Queen and corn dogs. Is it any wonder the poor dear is going haywire?

Kessler explores the ways in which the commercial food industry has manipulated the contents of prepared foods to ensure that these foods hit our “on” switch. There is more sugar. More fat. More salt. More perceived — but not always actual — flavour. All of these chemicals stimulate our brains’ reward systems.

This is not surprising. What is novel is the degree to which this manipulation occurs. Every last detail is considered: look, feel, texture, graininess or smoothness, the speed at which a food melts or crunches, the sound it makes when your molars grind or the lid pops, how it’s arranged on a plate or in a package, what you have to do to get it (ie the “food ritual”, eerily similar to the smoking ritual), the nuances of smell (one chemist explains that he can take a basic cooked beef flavour-scent and layer additional notes on top: grilled, roasted, even barbecued outdoors — entirely in a test tube).

Meta-food issues are also addressed: for example, just like real estate, overeating is location location location. Mice fed tasty treats in a certain location will come to prefer that location, even if they didn’t like it at first. If we were served scrumptious chili cheese dogs in a dirty alley, we’d eventually find ourselves cruising that alley, stepping over garbage as we salivated. 

Also interestingly, eaters prefer multisensory experiences. Once, years ago, in the throes of PMS insanity, I assembled and devoured horrid little sandwiches from two potato chips and peanut M&Ms as filling. This “PMS crunch” combo of crispy-crunch + sweet + slightly bitter + fat + salt is no doubt the secret behind the abomination known as chocolate covered pretzels. The more flavours, textures, and stimuli can be jammed in there, the better. Thus, chicken wings are glopped with blue cheese dip (with added sugar); fries are drowned in bacon/cheese/sour cream; double-deep fried nachos are suffocated beneath groaning layers of cheese (from a mix, also sugared), previously frozen and reconstituted avocado, and sour cream that probably contains no actual cream but rather hydrogenated corn or soy oil and emulsifiers.

Foodwise we’re like crazy cat ladies who hoard old shopping bags and bits of string. The more we can jam in there at once, the better. Thus, companies seductively offer us sprinkles, toppings, sauces, cheesy chunks, nummy bits… preferably all gunked into a bucket with a fried egg on top, as per Mr. Creosote’s menu order in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life.

Kessler interviews food scientists, neurobiologists, food industry executives and average people. The food industry exec confesses that companies are well aware of the research — such as the study showing that mice who are normally self-regulating will gorge themselves sick on Froot Loops and other “supermarket foods” — and they use it to their advantage. The food industry, remarks the exec, “is the manipulater of the consumers’ minds and desires.”

Kessler’s thorough explanation creates a damning critique of a deeply cynical industry obsessed with squeezing every last drop of profit out of consumers’ vulnerabilities and cheap commodities. That supersized drink — composed of colouring, water and syrup — you just ordered? 90% profit for the company. Costs them 5 cents to make while you pay $1.59 and think you got a great value.

“Our job,” says one food industry scientist, “was to sell more syrup.”

The worst part, as Kessler observes, is that we often don’t truly enjoy this consumption. The experience is contradictory: we eaters want it, but we don’t.

Even while we’re stuffing our faces, we’re experiencing a kind of artificial hedonism rather than a deep, existential enjoyment. Afterwards, of course, as the stomach cramps roll in like intestinal tsunamis of guilt and we’re left with empty packages, we’re certainly unhappy. As one “average person” remarks about one of her favourite junky snacks, “I do not want them, but I cannot control my desire to eat them.” 

Throughout the book, Kessler captures, with a deep compassion as well as medically informed insight, the complex experience of overeating. The real people’s stories ring painfully, heartbreakingly true.

He points out that because of this dysfunctional food environment, the majority of us are actually disordered eaters without having official “eating disorders”. To me, this is a fascinating insight. 

Problem drinkers often refuse the label of “alcoholic” because they don’t drink in the morning, or throw up, perhaps. Men who abuse their partners resist the title of “wife beater” because, y’know, it doesn’t happen often, and we were both mad.

Likewise, most of us would not self-label as “disordered eaters”, but that is exactly what we are. Our evolutionary physiology is out of whack with our modern environment. The result is chemical chaos, mismatched stimuli-responses, and a perfectly good body that we understand as messed up. As Kessler demonstrates through numerous examples, our bodies are doing the best jobs they can; it’s just that the tools they have currently suck, and there are agents who, like medieval demons, prey on our (very) soft underbellies.

So what do we do?

One answer is simple: Get away from the foods that make us cuckoo. Get away from the foods that tweak our brain the wrong way. But it’s not simply an issue of self-deprivation, for that only reinforces the cycle. As Kessler notes, rats who are intermittently rewarded will still seek the reward — for as long as it takes.

Rather, it’s about choosing — and seeking — foods and behaviours that affirm our brain’s chemistry and body’s operational controls while actually nourishing us.

As Kessler also notes, if we are immersed in this environment, we cannot rely on our intuition any more. We cannot always trust our perceptions. We inhabit an environment designed to mess with our reality in all kinds of ways: artificial boobs, electric lights at night, fast-paced work demands, close-up visual tasks, chemical stimulants in the morning and depressants in the evening. The days of the savannah are long behind us.

Kessler argues that “we need to replace chaos with structure”. Our lizard brain can keep on handling our breathing, heartbeat, pooping, and running away from angry dogs, but it’s time to put the recently evolved logical brain in the driver’s seat for most of our experiences. We evolved those food impulses, but we also evolved a very good thinky brain that can solve mathematical equations, produce symphonies, and write TPS reports.

Use that thinky part.

Recognize that we’re being miscued, led astray, and BSed by food companies that mean to do us harm. Recognize that what we feel in the immediate moment may not be “real” or ideal for us. Re-adjust our conception of how much we should be eating — since food companies have rapidly increased the suggested portion sizes beyond the actual mechanical capacities of the human stomach. Recognize, as Kessler suggests, that we are in “food rehab” like any other type of addict. We will inevitably relapse, but we have to get back on the horse. 

Don’t feel shame. Feel inspired to action. You can take control, he says. With some self-knowledge and critical thinking, we can all take control back.

And this is not, he concludes, about self-denial. It’s about claiming our evolutionary birthright: food that genuinely replenishes our needs, that tastes truly (not artificially) good, that makes us feel joyful rather than stuffed/guilty/overstimulated, and that works with our body’s chemistry rather than bludgeoning it into whimpering, masticating submission.