Monday, December 30, 2013

Health Research Recap hiatus and a new Paleo Challenge starting Jan. 1st

I hope no one minds that we are taking a little break from the weekly Health Research Recap for a little while to cover some things I've been working on and would like to cover.  I have read quite a few books recently and would like to do a review of each, starting with The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant on Thursday followed by Last Ape Standing by Chip Walter.  Both of these books are great and deserve to be recognized as they have altered my view of human health and performance.

I am also hard at work on a blog series titled, "The Human guide to being human".  One of the things that makes it difficult for people to understand how their lifestyle choices impact their health is that they really don't know how the human body works.  In this series, I am going to cover how our cells work as well as genetics, epigenetics, evolution, and that funky thing brewing in our large intestine called the microbiome that appears to have a huge impact on our health.  All of these topics are so fascinating and woven in to one another that I feel most people can dramatically improve their health simply by understanding how each works, how they all work together, and making decisions that take all of these things in to consideration.

Finally, I suppose I am a glutton for punishment, but I want to start a new Paleo challenge at the beginning of the year.  A central theme in both books mentioned above is how gene/environment interactions play a pivotal role in how we live today and the path we took to get here.  Most people who have flocked to the Paleo diet are covering the nutritional environment, but most aren't covering other, equally important, environments.  This challenge will be the most comprehensive challenge I have done and will include a nutrition component, sleep component, general physical activity component, exercise component, and stress component.  Each one will have concrete parameters and a way to score them.  Since I will be quite busy starting the 1st of the year with clients, I'm going to make it simple to score so that you can score it yourself and give me your scores each week.  We will do this via my Synergy Wellness Paleo Challenge facebook page found here.  Feel free to send me a friend request and ask to be in the group and I'll sign you in.  Once you are in you can invite any friends/clients who want to join.  Don't worry if you don't get in by Jan 1st, the first 5 days will be practice and we can do total scores and average weekly scores.  I will be putting up the scoring system on the facebook page on Dec. 30th.

That's all for now, My review of The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant will be up on Thursday.  Enjoy your New Years' celebration.