A new/old take on health

It's that time of year again, when I become convicted that I must do something about my health. I may have mentioned before, that a lifetime of chubbiness that never really slowed me down has become a real unhealthiness. It's a combination of my age and a stressful job I had (thank you Vancouver Housing Authority for helping me gain 70lbs of fat in 2.5 years--you suck).

So, earlier this year I tried and loved the juice fast thing (aka reboot diet). I watched the movie, "fat sick and nearly dead" and it really impressed me. So why would I not just try that again? Well it's a little expensive. Not the diet itself. That guy made everything basically free and as near as I can tell he doesn't even make anything of selling juicers. Somehow eating that many veggies adds up. Anyway, there's a second factor.

I'm a big fan of the two factor theory. There's usually a gas pedal and a brake pedal in life. If your car won't go very fast it could be that you aren't stepping on the gas or it could be that you've got the brake on. In order for a diet to be effective it needs to work AND in needs to be doable. To satisfy both of those factors, despite all the people who will argue that weight loss is a simple matter of burning more calories than you take it, you need a diet that is effective for your body and your mind. There was a big labor factor in juicing. I was hard to do for more than 3 days. I need something I can do for longer, like 90 days.

My friend Pam inspired me to chronicle my search for a diet and my attempts. She's doing something very similar. The next 10 days are going to be insanely busy for me, but I'm going to start anyway. I can't put it off any longer.

The diet I'm selecting, which is recommended to me by my friend Adam, will be the Paleodiet. I know virtually nothing about it, accept it's very controversial and my instincts tell me that a caveman diet will work for both my body and my mind.

I'm not a believer in cavemen living thousands of years ago, in fact I don't think the earth would take several million years to cool, so we haven't had hundreds of billions of years to "evolve" into the complicated beings we are today. But I do think humans were hunter/gatherer for many years and that such a lifestyle is likely to be more healthy than the genetically modified, over processed, chemical-laden, radiated convenience foods we eat now. One thing the reboot diet taught me, perhaps unintentionally, was that smelling food cooking made it taste better AND I ate less of it when it came. If that one simple factor can be so impactful on my apatite, I could be missing tons of little secrets that I actually knew when I was a kid but forgot as I became a "responsible" brick in the wall.

In addition to the caveman diet, I'm going to up the convenience factor by doing the body by Vi thing. I'm going to eat meal replacement shakes whenever I'm too busy to actually make a meal.

I'll dig into it more soon, but my research has already netted me a cool website called, "Nerd Fitness" which is a good sign. But I'm going to take it a step further, still.

I find that I personally have better results when I A) tell people I'm doing it (which is where you come it) and B) I immerse myself in it. So I'm going to also begin other aspects of hunter/gatherer life. I'm going to start walking more everyday. I'm also going to start sleeping much earlier and rising much earlier (which is a freakish thing for me as you know). I've already blogged about sleeping twice a night, I'd really like to try it. My guess is that my body will go into such a shock from the rising with the sun thing that I won't notice the screwy diet. Oh and I'm also going to start shooting the bow more, I already started that today.

So these are my plans. I hope you'll join me on my crazy adventure. I haven't started out yet. I've got a little more planning to do, but it's going to happen...soon...