"I had chronic brain fog." "I never felt rested when I woke up." "I got migraines all the time." "I was hungry all the time, and people feared for their lives when they were around me when I got hungry, because I crashed and turned into a crazy person." "And just felt generally cranky and... bad, basically." "The outlook on life prior to being diagnosed and figuring out what was going on was pretty bleak." "I had chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia." "Chronic migraines, that was a huge one." "I had chronic gastrointestinal issues." "And I saw gastroenterologists for several years, and no one ever told me it could be related to food." "I thought that I had early-onset rheumatoid arthritis." "I had chronic adult acne." "I had numbness in my feet and in my limbs." "I was always cold." "Everything and anything I took really didn't provide me any relief whatsoever." "How I would I have been?" "35, or 34, or something." "You're probably not supposed to feel that crappy at that age, right?" "That's not old." "But I felt old." "I had come to just really live with it." "It became part of my life." "I remember feeling strange, feeling weird from very early on, you know." "Not feeling healthy." "Not feeling like I lived to full capacity." "Even as a child." "And that's weird." "I mean, the thing is everyone is so sick in this country." "Our food system is so broken." "The solution given to me by my GP was," ""Don't worry." "If you take these meds now," ""you'll be able to keep these... you know, suppress these issues that you're facing, and you should be able to live longer."" "It's amazing..." "You know, it's like the human body just gets comfy with stuff or accepting of conditions and just kind of like..." "It's like, "Oh, this is gonna hurt."" "Or, "I have a bum knee," or I have a whatever." ""We'll just kind of deal with it." "We'll compensate." "We'll be fine."" "And so, you get used to those things." "And so, the same thing happened with me." "I just felt horrible, but did it for so long that I forgot how bad I actually felt and how it felt to feel good." "I was never extremely sick, but I was never well either." "I was vegetarian for about six years." "I ate fish sometimes, but was mostly vegetarian, and also mostly dairy-free, because the person I was with at the time had a dairy allergy." "So in addition to being vegetarian," "I was also eating way more soy than anyone should ever consume over their lifetime." "Because we had all the dairy substitutes, like the fake butter, and the soy milk, and the..." "I don't even remember what else, but it was all pretty horrible." "And I also worked in vegetarian restaurants at the time." "That was my life, basically, and was eating seitan, which is wheat gluten, sandwiches on rye bread." "So, I was just eating a straight-up gluten sandwich." "So gluten and soy were, like, my main staples in my diet, and I was completely the angry chef that threw pans." "I was... psychotic and not a happy person." "And of course, there were other factors." "It wasn't 100% diet, but that played a huge role." "I was definitely the sickest I've ever been and the unhappiest I've ever been." "My husband was Paleo for almost a year." "And through that year, every time I ate, I had just horrid pain, stomach pain, and he would say, "I really think that you have Coeliac", and I think you need to get it checked out."" "And if you have it, if you take about a pinch of saffron, you'll want to..." "My specialty as a chef was Italian." "After about a year, we were having a celebration." "It was one of the kids' birthdays." "And I was making, of course, all of that, and there he was, making his own dinner." "And I looked at him, and I said," ""You're, like, really never gonna have my pizza and pasta again, are you?"" "And he goes, "No."" "And he said, "I really think that you have Coeliac", and you really need to go get it checked out."" "They checked for the wrong antibodies." "I checked out negative." "The doctor that was sitting there talking to me said," ""You're negative, but you know what we're gonna do?"" "He said, "I really think..." "From what you're telling me"," ""I really think you might have Coeliac, and so, we're gonna do a biopsy of your colon."" "He starts telling me how he's going to cut into my colon, and as he's telling me, he's..." "nodding off, falling asleep." "And I'm just like, "Hmm." "That doesn't sound like a good option to me."" "And I thought, "Why is the next step so invasive?"" ""Why isn't it just cut these foods from you diet?" "Why not start there?"" "I got diagnosed with Coeliac Disease about four years ago and was lucky enough where I had typical GI issues and very physical manifestations of that." "So, if I ate gluten, I knew that I ate it and felt horrible." "So, went gluten-free, and that did not fix things." "We've tried gluten-free." "We've tried gluten-free vegan." "We tried all of those different variations of it." "I ended up with no energy and... puffy." "Is the only way I can kind of describe that." "It's like my body fat percentage took a nosedive in the wrong direction." "And I was lethargic, and I just didn't feel good that way." "So we did that for maybe six months or so and then said that's enough of that... and went back." "I grew up in Olympia, Washington." "I grew up in a totally normal family, your standard, American family, and grew up eating cereal, and bagels, and Subway sandwiches." "And there was no food in the food that I was eating." "There was no pasture-roaming animals." "There was no grass-fed meat." "There were no seasonal, local vegetables." "It was like whatever we could pick up and throw in a plastic bag at the grocery store, and, like, whatever is on sale." "A general health consciousness was very strongly present in my life because my parents ran a pharmacy." "My father was a pharmacist, which means that we ate healthy according to conventional wisdom on what is a healthy diet." "So I ate very little meat." "No fat at all." "That was forbidden." "We had the fat substitutes, of course, every day on the table." "Margarine instead of butter, the heart-healthy alternative." "None of us in the family was healthy." "My father suffered psoriasis heavily." "My mother had severe asthma." "My sister, which I discovered now, clearly had a histamine problem." "I had a number of health issues." "You know, I had this asthma as well, skin problems." "Major energy dips throughout the day as being a child." "Now, I realize what was the reason for that." "I was never able to wake up in the morning." "It was hell to drag my body to school and to pay attention in school." "I couldn't..." "It was impossible." "I would fall asleep in the first hours of class." "Nobody could tell me why that was, and nobody questioned it even." "So from this background..." "You know, it would have been different if we had grown up in a family eating junk food all the time." "We did not." "So we were obviously doing everything correct according to conventional standards." "I had several inflammations going on in my body." "I had aching joints all the time." "I was lethargic, tired all day long." "It doesn't even matter if I had slept six hours, or 12, or 14 hours," "I was just tired the entire day." "My life before going Paleo was pretty much that of a fitness nut." "Like, just doing silly workouts at a commercial gym." "I think people are really tired of the conventional stuff they've been told for years, so they, eventually, are really ready for a change." "I went to my doctor in my early 30s." "And my doctor said to me, "Based on your blood work," ""and based on the results that we've got back, you have an increased risk of X, Y, and Z in terms of lifestyle diseases."" "My blood sugar was very high." "My cholesterol levels were high." "My blood pressure was very high." "When I asked him for lifestyle alternatives, he said, "Well, you're eating a low-fat diet"," ""and you're currently going to the gym," ""so there's nothing else you can do." ""You're kind of doing the right things." ""You're not a drinker." "You don't smoke." "Everything is fine." ""It's just about your genetic heritage and the fact you're getting a little bit older."" "I didn't accept that, really because I was scared of taking those medications, especially in the long term." "I've been practicing as a doctor for about 25 years." "Most of my patients come with what we would call chronic or sort of long-standing health issues." "Some of the problems might be things like irritable bowel syndrome, diabetes, headaches, migraine, general fatigue." "Usually, the individual has either not had a good experience with conventional medicine or conventional approaches, and/or there really isn't very much the conventional approaches can offer that person." "But this is what's happening to people." "They're being told, "Just accept it." ""Here you go." "Here's your diagnosis." ""I'm sorry." "This is the pill." "Take it." "I'm sorry." "You don't get any other choices."" "There's a reason why... conventional wisdom says, "Do this."" "Everybody does it, and it ends up all crappy." "Well, I used to work in a hospital." "And I became..." "Once I learned about Paleo and the benefits," "I became so frustrated at the amount of drugs that were being pumped into people for stuff that could be solved with a good diet and some exercise." "Wisdom is just such a..." "Ugh!" "It's such an oxymoron." "When we use the word "conventional wisdom,"" "it seems like forever, but it's actually maybe five years old, or 10 years old, or 20 years old." "It mortifies me sometimes to think of the numbers of people that are sick because they've been lied to." "When people take conventional nutritional advice, as we generally have been for the last 30 or 40 years, to eat less fat and more carbohydrate-rich foods, including starchy carbohydrates, this isn't good for health." "It damages health." "People underestimate how powerful taking charge of their diet can be." "We are just taught to walk into a grocery store, and if it's in a box, it's in there, it's good for us." "We can consume it." "It's safe for human consumption, right?" "But the fact of the matter is when you approach food without any of that awareness, you're not tapped in at all to what your body needs, what it needs to function and thrive." "What you put into your body, that's your fuel." "If you're not fueling your body right, it'll break down at some point, you know?" "This grain, you know, diet pure-bred thing is pushed on people from, like, grade school." "It's like that's all people know." "You have to be able to recognize when the government, and the corporations, and the institutions, and the society are lying to you, or deceiving you, or just simply don't know what they're talking about." "They're ignorant." "And find out what's driving them." "Where's the money, so to speak." "We used to be instinctual creatures who would hunt and gather our own food, whether it be berries, or vegetables, or free-range animals, you know, deer or bison." "Morning, mate." "I have always had a really bad relationship with food, so I knew something had to change." "I wanted to make sure it was a sustainable change." " Back to work." " Yeah, I feel rested though." "I'm way better than I was when I left." "I'd always struggle with sleeping and training really." "I'd always trained since a very early age." "I've always played pretty competitive sports, but there's always been kind of something missing." "I always knew I wasn't getting the most out of what I could be essentially." "We had a patient come in one day." "He was in his early 70s." "He came in for a relatively minor operation." "He'd never been in hospital before." "That was the the thing that really, sort of, stuck out at me." "He also had never really been unwell." "And I was amazed at how energized and vital this person was." "You know, he's sort of 50 years older than me and in a much better state of health." "I asked him to what he attributed his good health, and his wellness, and his energy, and he explained to me that he thought a lot of it was down to some very simple things that he did in his life." "The way he ate." "He was a regular cyclist, for example." "He was also just fundamentally very interested in life." "My curiosity got the better of me again later that day when I went into town and ended up buying a book on nutrition." "I decided to apply the principles in my own life." "Once I'd done that, the effects on my own health and wellness were really nothing short of transformational." "I like to eat food that resembles what it is in its true, natural form." "I like to be close to nature." "I like to be outdoors a lot." "I like to sleep according to my natural cycle." "Wake up when my body feels like waking up." "I like moving in the very functional, sort of, primal way, so that's hiking, and running, and rock climbing." "Just being out there, and using my body, and actually really feel like I'm living instead of sort of existing in an office cubicle, if that makes sense." "So, to me, Paleo represents that very natural lifestyle." "Being in the sun, and getting lots of vitamin D, eating sustainable food, cooking from scratch." "It's a slow kind of living, which is also not sort of slow in its speed." "It's just sort of coming back to the way we used to live and used to feel, I suppose, as well." "When I realized that the Paleo lifestyle was scientifically sound," "I would say it's been over the last three years." "I mean, I came from a traditional, medical background." "I don't recall ever taking a single nutrition course." "So most of my knowledge of how our diets impacted health was similar to where everybody else was getting their information." "But over the last few years, I've been doing a fellowship in anti-aging and regenerative medicine, and their focus is on diet to a certain extent." "And so that's when I started to realize that there was a lot of scientific evidence that had been out there for years that was being ignored because it wasn't consistent with the conventional wisdom." "And so, it was just pushed aside." "But I saw studies that were done 20 years ago, 30 years ago, that supported the improvements in health from a Paleo-type lifestyle." "So, that's when I started to realize that there was legitimacy on a scientific basis." "Paleo is eating whole foods, real foods, that you... either get from a farm," "or you get from, you know, your rancher." "I mean, you can get them from in the store obviously, but you don't get them from a box." "It also sometimes has shrimp paste as an optional ingredient." "It's about eating real food." "Eating food that our grandparents would recognize as food." "Eating food that isn't from a factory but is from farms, and ranches, and our backyards optimally if we can garden without killing everything, which I can't." "There's a very different consciousness about the sourcing of your food, where it comes from, how it's prepared, the oils that it's prepared in, and just kind of your relationship to being able to prepare those things yourself in your own kitchen." "The focus is all about eating high-quality foods, eating natural foods, and eating foods that are actually good for you and will help fuel you, as opposed to just being for weight loss." "What would common sense dictate would be the best diet for us as a species?" "Well, you could argue a diet based on the foods that we have been eating the longest in terms of our time on this planet." "I mean, those are the foods we have evolved to eat, that we're likely to be best adapted to, and are gonna be broadly the best for us." "So, how long have we been evolving?" "Well, it depends who you ask." "But if you ask an evolutionist, there's a pretty stock answer." "It's about two and a half million years." "Paleo from a dietary perspective is really a way of modeling what our ancient ancestor did, in terms of hunter-gatherers, and taking the best of that and applying it to what we should do today in terms of food." "In terms of our food choices, it's wild meat, wild fish, vegetation, fruit, nuts, and really trying to look at the kind of macro-nutrient ratios that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had as part and parcel of their eating habits." "The diet really has to be in place for everything else to work as well." "When we treat patients, really I would say... over 80% of what we do has to do with the diet." "At this point, it's an intervention." " Absolutely." "And we're trying to get you as healthy as we can get you." " We can see the results already." " Right." "Right." "And so, our goal is always to have you get most of your nutrition from your food." "My doctor was quite surprised to see the difference." " A-plus is what he said." " Really?" "And you got to change some of your medications, right?" " Yes, he has." " Okay." "What did he take off?" "Well, we got rid of the atenolol." "Oh, good." "Okay." "So since November then, your weight has dropped about 22, 24 pounds?" "Yeah." "Yes." " And that's just..." "Is that still continuing?" "Yes." " Are you plateauing or..." " No." " No, still..." "Okay." " It's a nice surprise when you get on the scale and go, "Whoo!" "Where does that go?"" "With the diet that you're on, and as you lose weight, your need for that..." "Your insulin sensitivity will hopefully improve, and you'll need less and less of that medication." "And as you drop your blood pressure, or your weight, your blood pressure medication is gonna come down too." "But it's like one happens and then the next." "And then one happens and then the next." "You're not depriving yourself of anything." "The only thing you're depriving yourself of is chips, and bread... and all the things that aren't good for you." "That you don't miss." "A co-worker said to me..." "They were having a pizza party for someone who was retiring." "So I had my stuff, and they said..." "She turned to me..." "And she's had a heart attack, and she has been told not to eat the fast food and stuff that she always eats." ""When are you gonna get back to eating real food?"" "And I was like, "But I am." "But I am."" ""When are you gonna get to eat real food again?"" "And she's just slopping down her tacos from Taco Bell every day." "A lot of times once the diet is in place, the others follow." "The sleep improves." "The weight goes away." "We were satisfied with what we knew to be, and we thought this was it." "You grow old, and you die, and you feel miserable, and you have aches and pains, and that's just part of the life process." "And we know that that doesn't have to be." "So, we're moving more." "We're feeling better." "It's incredible." "I remember growing up, and my grandmother would go to the markets every morning, and she would buy meat from the butcher." "She would bring back bags of vegetables and fruit." "We would go hunting, fishing, quite often foraging for berries and mushrooms, and she would cook from scratch." "That's not that far back." "When people say, "Well, actually it's not possible"" "to try and live, you know, ancestral way in the modern world,"" "I say, "Well, we're not actually, literally doing that."" "We're just saying," ""Hey, how about we take away some of these industrial processes," ""and mutating our food," ""and changing things the way they should be naturally?" "And just try and leave a little bit more the way that we're intended to by nature."" "So when did we first start to cultivate crops, things like corn and wheat?" "Well, the paleontological record suggests that this was probably just about 10,000 years ago." "Now, that sounds like a long time ago, but from an evolutionary perspective, it's very recent, and genes change very slowly." "While foods like grains, and refined sugar, and refined vegetable oils are relatively recent additions to the diet, the average diet has about 70% of calories contributed by these foods." "A lot of people do have to eat every two hours to sustain their blood sugar because they are eating foods that are causing them to crash, and I used to be one of those people." "And I used to have to bring food with me all the time, because if I went two hours without eating," "I would crash and feel... really awful." "When people think that they need to eat every two hours to sustain their blood sugar, that's 'cause they're eating foods that are not sustaining their blood sugar." "If all you're craving is bread, and cookies, and pancakes, and cupcakes, and all that, then yes, it is restrictive, because you shouldn't be eating those things." "If you eat a lot of, for example, either sugary or starchy foods, you're going to tend to get quite high levels of sugar in the bloodstream." "If blood sugar levels go very high, the problems is is that a huge surge of insulin can drive blood sugar levels to sort of sub-normal levels." "When blood sugar levels get low, people can get tired and a bit listless." "In fact, that was the major cause of my problems with fatigue when I was a lot younger." "But also it can tend to make people hungry and to crave foods, specifically for, say, sweet foods, be it chocolate, or candy, or biscuits, or cookies, and foods like those." "That's a really good way of describing it, a slave to food, because so many of us are dependent on these addictions." "You know, we have this..." "We actually are addicted to sugar and carbohydrates." "People say, "Oh, no, I just like bread, and I like pasta."" "And I say, "No, no, you're addicted to bread and pasta."" "My biggest challenge becoming Paleo was giving up... carbs and sugar." "Um, it was awful." "It is hard, because they're craving their sugar fix." "Once you get past that withdrawal stage, it becomes much easier." "Once you start eating satiating foods that are nutritious, you don't..." "Well, A, you start craving nutritious foods." "That's another little thing that's changed." "You don't feel you need to eat right away to, kind of... to feel human again, you know." "Call it "hangry." People would just get hungry and angry, and you don't want to be near them at that time until they get their little muesli bar." "A lot of people that have the experience of craving sweet foods and then succumbing to eating them imagine that they lack self control, or they have a weak will, or an inadequate personality, but actually, the reality is for the majority of these people," "the problem isn't some sort of psychological frailty, it's a physiological imbalance." "And very often, that imbalance has been induced by eating a supposedly "healthy," low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet." "The majority of people with Coeliac Disease don't have digestive..." "uh, symptoms." "So most people think it's Coeliac Disease, they think, "Oh, you got GI issues." "You have stomach aches", and you have all this kind of stuff."" "And that's not the case at all." "Most people don't have those symptoms." "Most people are just munching away on their Wonder Bread and stuff, and they have no idea that by eating that that's tied to their migraines or their, you know... whatever other condition that they have." "Whether it's gluten intolerance or Coeliac Disease, it can manifest in any part of your body." "Not just the digestive tract." "Most people think "Oh, I don't have stomach ache, then I'm fine."" "And that's not the case at all." "It's actually... almost on the verge of scary how much it can make me..." "not be pleasant." "I mean, like a... complete asshole." "I mean, just, like, a complete jerk." "And I know that I'm being a jerk, so it's like, I'm like, "God, why are you being..."" "And it's just..." "It's like I can't do anything to change it." "Yeah, gluten is nasty." "There seems to be an increasingly-recognized correlation between gluten issues and brain issues." "And whether that's the form of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, whether that's attention deficit disorders in children, whether that's even autism." "You know, conventional wisdom is," ""Grains are good, and you gotta eat..."" "however many servings they say you have to eat of grains now and stuff like that." "People need to question where that came from, how that came about, why that started, why we're doing all that." "Not just... accepting it at face value." "There's ample evidence that grains are detrimental to health because of their anti-nutrient qualities." "So, basically, they contain compounds that are harmful and detrimental to the gut." "So they affect digestion." "They irritate the lining of the gut." "They prevent certain nutrients from being absorbed." "By doing so, you're not getting the best out of the other foods that you're eating." "When our colon is damaged..." "It's protected by one cell, with protection, so it's easy to..." "Like this." "I just damaged my colon." "That's all it would take, something like that, that kind of an irritation, like that." "Our mum had, like, a wheat and gluten intolerance, and we've both kind of picked that up as well," "So, I think one of the biggest things for me especially is the fact that I'm not bloated anymore." "I'm not..." "I don't feel that real lethargy after I've eaten a big meal." "And I'm now eating feeling sustainably full, and then feeling good an hour, two hours later, rather than wanting to sort of fall asleep on the sofa." " Yeah, that was big." " Big difference, definitely." " Mark, will you bring me down some packs, mate?" "Yeah." "Can I have some mango?" "I used to work shifts in a hospital, so coming from a shift, to the gym to work out, there was nothing available." "I couldn't just stop in a supermarket, and that really frustrated me." "And there was nothing." "You could either buy a chicken breast that was pumped full of potato starch, or rice starch, or something." "Or you could have some fruit." "And there was nothing complete, nothing that would help us, so we decided to do it ourselves." "If we'd have known what we know now, like, 10 or 15 years ago, we would have changed, like, someone's life that's really close to us." "Like, our mum died from cancer, so... if we'd have known all this stuff 15, 20 years ago, potentially, we could have changed it, you know." "Yeah, we maybe couldn't have changed the fact that she died," " but we could have probably..." " Yeah." "Made a big impact." "Yeah, definitely." "So it's..." "And this is why, like, it's so close to us." "And the gym, and the whole ethos is a lifestyle shift, and we just wanna try and help, like... shift that, 'cause we know that there's better stuff out there, you know." "For an increasing proportion of the population, the grains are very inflammatory in the bowel, and that sets up a lot of inflammation elsewhere in the body." "And since inflammation is the main driver for disease, then we wanna keep the inflammation low." "Back when I was still eating a standard, American diet, and I was a traditionally-practicing physician," "I had a daughter who struggled with a lot of health issues." "Primarily, gastrointestinal-type issues." "So, we went the gamut of the traditional medicine model." "You know, she saw gastroenterologists, and had studies done, and was given medications, none of which made any difference in her situation." "And then she, on her own, tried different kinds of diets." "'Cause she knew intuitively that there had to be a dietary component to what was going on, even though I couldn't really guide her at that point." "But she tried vegetarianism and veganism." "None of those were healthy for her either." "She ended up in the hospital several times actually." "At the time, my mom was a very conventional physician of Western medicine, and she did not agree at all with what I was doing." "I mean, at the point, her belief system was that supplements and medication could really help cure chronic conditions." "It was a relief to me to see her improving finally." "I did feel badly I didn't have the knowledge base years earlier that I could have helped her." "You know, I grew up living off of these foods that were in the middle of these alleys of the grocery stores when nothing I was eating was ever alive." "And that's what we're taught, and it's just so broken to me." "As a kid, when I ate stuff like this, I drained half the box." " A big bowl?" " A big bowl." "So there's 18 servings." "Let's just round it off and say 20." "So let's say when, you know, the kid goes to town on this, you've got 10 servings." "That's like 270 grams of carbs in a sitting, which is a piece of cake to do." " Absolutely no problem with that." " That's huge." "Yeah, same serving size." "Even a little more carbohydrate-dense." "And, you know, honestly, this stuff would be so sweet that I might even at less than that in a way even as a kid." "So, then you've got the Kashi." "It's whole-grain, and, you know, it looks like hurt seals are being saved on this thing, and all that stuff." "So their serving is a little bit larger." "It's a full cup." "It's 41 grams of carbs." "So, really, I think this one is even more carb-dense than..." " Than the other." " Than the Frosted Flakes are." "So, yeah, this stuff is so damn yummy, and it's really just not very good for you, just given the carbohydrate content." "And, again, nobody is gonna sit down and eat a cup of this." "Well, you know, I think it's probably easy in the morning for kids to get up and eat cereal and have some milk." "But what we're seeing is an epidemic of obesity and insulin resistance with children today." " Right." " Which is..." "And diabetes, which is a huge problem." "And these boxes and bags of food that are prepared with high carbohydrates and high sugar" " are definitely causing that." " Right." "And the soda at lunch and the Gatorade at the soccer game before dinner." "Yeah." "And pretty soon, they have a carbohydrate load" " that far exceeds anything that any human should ever consume." "Right." "So sugar comes, obviously, from sugar in the diet, but it also comes from starch." "Starch is sugar." "It's just chains of glucose molecules." "When we eat starchy foods, like bread, potatoes, rice, pasta, and breakfast cereals, generally, we get considerable amounts of sugar liberated into the bloodstream." "It will obviously lead to considerable surges in the hormone insulin." "The purpose of insulin in that stage is to force the blood glucose into muscle tissue, into the cells to be utilized as energy." "Any the excess is stored in the liver." "Longer-term storage is glycogen." "And then beyond that, it's stored as fat." "Elevated insulin basically means we have a constant supply of energy, and so, there is no need for your body to break down further energy stores, i.e. fat stores, to provide energy." "So, what insulin does is facilitate the uptake of fat into the fat cells." "The fat can get out again, but unfortunately, insulin reduces the body's ability to do that." "It impairs what we call "lipolysis", which is fancy language for release of fat basically." "Eating little and often, which is what conventional wisdom tells us to manage blood glucose, is far less effective than eating a larger meal." "We're always digesting and never building." "It's the wrong system." "We need to eat, absorb what we're eating, digest it, build an anabolic environment." "Go hours without eating." "Then eat again." "So, we're not grazers." "We're not ruminants." "There's just something wrong with that whole concept, evolutionary, dietary health-wise." "If you're eating a diet based on foods that help basically bring insulin levels down, stabilize blood sugar levels, then you're going to facilitate fat loss." "You can effectively then use that fat as a fuel, a bit like a hibernating bear." "Once I cut out the grains and the really high-carby stuff," "I was able to go hours and hours without eating, and I might feel hungry." "I might feel like I need to eat." "I'm getting to the point where I'm hungry." "But it wasn't an emergency." "I could go without eating, which I found really strange, and not feel really hungry." "And then eat dinner, and then be fine, and then continue eating the next day as normal." "Essentially, feeding off your own fat coupled with the fact that you've probably stabilized blood sugar levels and are gonna be less prone to low blood sugar levels that can trigger hunger is going to leave people fundamentally less hungry." "If you take individuals off their supposedly healthy high-carb diet and put them on something a bit lower-carb, a bit more Paleo, then they automatically eat less." "And I've seen this time and again in practice." "Typically, people will eat several hundred calories less each day eating this way." "So now, you have a diet that facilitates fat loss, that is fundamentally healthy, that does not leave people hungry." "I went through a very significant stage of a classic body builder's diet in the sense of many small meals a day with a decline in carbohydrates throughout the day." "Absolutely no fat." "And so, this lead to several crash diets even because I wasn't able to shed fat." "I actually invented a diet of my own at a certain point, which was a bar of chocolate and many liters of water a day." "Just to say how far it went." "It led to a very unnatural and disturbed take on diet and relation with food." "From the age of 16 until the age of about 25..." "That's almost 10 years." "I was obsessed with eating low-fat food." "It was drilled into me through magazine articles and TV ads, and everything had to be low-fat." "Who knows how much damage I've done by cutting out all the actual goodness of saturated fats in the foods." "That just kind of stuck with me." "That was the hardest thing to shift when I started eating Paleo." "To shift my thinking from saturated fat is bad to actually, saturated fat is not the enemy." "It's the high-processed sugars and carbohydrates that's causing a lot of the problems." "Reality is if you look at the evidence, there isn't really much to be feared in fat." "It doesn't appear to be inherently fattening." "And that's possibly because of its impact or lack of impact on certain hormones, including insulin." "It helps transport essential fatty acids and fat-soluble vitamins and nutrients to our body." "Without that ability, we wouldn't be able to absorb all our fat-soluble vitamins and nutrients." "A low-fat diet makes that very difficult." "There are many ways to lose weight." "And some people can lose weight on a low-fat diet." "I was able to manage my weight for a very long time based on a low-fat diet, but I wasn't healthy." "So, weight alone is not... shouldn't be seen as the mark of good health." "Though I was on very low-fat diets, you know, your skin will deteriorate." "Your hair will be in, you know, much worse condition." "In the world of very low-fat diets being fashionable to normal, conventional wisdom telling us, "That's the norm."" "We tend to kind of avoid dietary fat, but it's extremely important." "For myself, as being male, and suffering from low testosterone for much of my adult life, part of that reason was because I wasn't eating any, any, any fat that I could be aware of." "I was minimizing fat at every single opportunity." "And it wasn't till I started adding dietary fat to my diet, that I started to have healthy levels of testosterone." "If we did not eat fat, we would die." "There's essential fatty acids." "There are essential amino acids." "If we do not eat protein, we will die." "There are no essential carbohydrates." "The fact that we're suffering from a lot of diseases in terms of mental degeneration." "A lot of this, again, is linked to excess carbohydrates and not enough..." "And this following a low-fat diet." "Most of our brain is fat." "Our cell membranes are part of fat." "It provides structure and integrity to every cell in the body." "It's not just an energy source." "But as an energy source, it is far superior to glucose and carbohydrates in every measure." "It's the preferred fuel for our heart." "A lot of hormones are reliant on access to dietary fat and cholesterol, dietary cholesterol." "My family is one of those families with "high cholesterol."" "My grandma has been eating margarine since the 50s when one of her family members had a heart attack at a young age and is still horrified of an egg yolk." "Some people find a correlation between dietary cholesterol and heart disease." "That's wrong." "The problem with cholesterol and heart disease is oxidated cholesterol, which is inflamed cholesterol." "Not dietary or serum cholesterols." "When you have an inflammation in the body, you can oxidize your cholesterol, and that can cause problems." "So the issue is not to eliminate or suppress cholesterol, which is fundamental to our health." "In fact, it's the most powerful antioxidant in our body, and now, we're suppressing it." "What we should be doing is eliminating the cause of the inflammation." "What's the cause of the inflammation?" "Bad dietary choices." "Our rush towards a diet away from fat towards carbohydrate-rich foods could actually be fueling rates of, for example, overweight and obesity, but also allied problems including cardiovascular disease, heart disease, and stroke, and what we call type two diabetes." "One of the pervading theories as to what it is that actually causes illness, be it type two diabetes, or excess weight, or cardiovascular disease, relates to a physiological process known as inflammation." "So for example, if I, you know, kick a table hard enough with bare feet, after an hour or two, I'm gonna have a red, swollen, tender toe." "That is inflammation." "But we're talking about here a sort of lower-grade inflammation throughout the body." "What's called systemic inflammation." "Basically, it's inflammation that occurs in the body that isn't easily detected on a kind of microscopic level." "That's the kind of starting point for a lot of chronic lifestyle diseases." "Now, systemic inflammation appears to be a potent cause of excess weight and other chronic diseases." "One of the things that causes inflammation within the body is spikes in blood sugar." "Now, that is another reason for not eating a diet replete with foods that actually cause spikes in blood sugar." "Some can be caused by exercise, or stress, or injury, but most of the negative inflammatory responses are from our modern diet, and those are foods that we're not designed to eat, and that's grains, legumes, processed foods, pasteurized dairy." "Another thing we know causes inflammation is a sort of fat called the omega-6 fats that we find, for example, in vegetable oils." "So you find it in sunflower oil, or safflower oil, or soy oil." "So very often, we're advised to eat these in preference to saturated fat." "But actually, there's an argument for saying that the inflammation caused by omega-6 fats, as I say, in vegetable oils, is something that we should probably avoid." "As our gut becomes more permeable, larger and larger molecules can move through our gut into the bloodstream." "The body doesn't recognize these as me." "It recognizes them as not me, so it develops an antibody to attack it." "Now, these things, these little structures, tend to resemble other parts of our body that are me." "So as the antibodies go in and attack that thing, then they go..." "They're moving down the bloodstream, and they go, "Oh!" "That knee joint looks a lot like that thing I just attacked."" "And it attacks the knee, or it attacks something else." "As the inflammation gets worse, the assault on the colon continues through this excess of grain, and legume, and processed food, the junctions widen, and widen, and widen, and the problem gets more and more exacerbated and more and more serious." "There is significant evidence that this type of inflammation leads to a whole host of modern lifestyle diseases from heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancer..." "The whole gamut of modern lifestyle disease." "Whatever is weakest in your body, the inflammation will attack and have the most damage to." "We see the symptoms manifest perhaps uniquely in different individuals, but they share a common cause, poor food choices in their diet." "Repeated exposure to certain foodstuffs, repeated exposure to toxins, the inability for the body to defend itself in the long term is what allows disease to manifest itself, and that takes a significant period of time." "So this isn't about a short-term exposure to, say, gluten." "It's what happens over repeated exposure from years, to decades, to a generation or so of exposure to these foods that becomes harmful and affects us in terms of long-term, chronic lifestyle disease." "New squeeze-on Chiffon Liquid Margarine." "The squeeze is on." "There are some fats in the diet that really should be avoided." "For example, the industrially-produced fats, so processed fats." "One example of that are what we call partially hydrogenated fats that are used in the processing of many processed foods, including some margarines." "There are other forms of processing." "There's something called interesterification which involves basically chopping up fats with enzymes and then reassembling them into completely novel fats." "Trans fats are extremely unhealthy." "They have been linked to heart disease." "They are a man-made product by and large." "When we eat fat that's been overheated or chemically altered, they're now in a structure that our body doesn't recognize, and it doesn't know what to do with them." "It has to be stored somehow as a toxin, maybe surrounded in body fat, or it causes an inflammation." "It's not a healthy source of fat, and our body recognizes it and has to try to deal with it." "That's why..." "I mean, you can see even conventionally, a lot of manufacturers are now trying to reduce the amount of trans fats or eliminate trans fats entirely, because the evidence is overwhelming that they are an unhealthy source of fat." "On the other hand, I think there's nothing to be feared in fats found naturally in the diet." "Particularly in whole foods where you find those fats naturally within that food." "For example, a piece of meat." "When I talk to people about what I eat, they get surprised that I'm..." "That I look the way that I look, and I'm not huge..." "As big as a couch, because I do eat a lot of saturated fat." "You know, I eat lots of eggs, and lots of butter, um... meat." "You know, I eat fatty cuts of meat." "I love my pork belly and things like that." "I never used to cook with certain parts of meat." "You know, it was always chicken breast, steak, maybe some mincemeat, sausages." "Kind of your typical protein sources." "Whereas now, you know, I'm trying out offal." "I'm trying out different cuts of meat." "More nose to tail kind of dining and cooking, which I think, A, is more ethical and, you know, healthier for the planet, because we're utilizing all of the animal." "But it's also very nutritious." "You know, making bone broth and cooking with all parts of the meat that you get." "There's two cows worth of bones in there." "And we start to cook this, these are the sort of trimmings." "All the gristles, all the bones go straight into the tub." "We boil them off for two days." "The American customers come in as well." "They're asking for it specifically." "I mean, we sort of market this." "We don't call it bone broth particularly." "Um, we market it as a moo shot, which is just a quarter-pound little tub." "There's neck..." "Before or after you've been training, so it's like a beef tea." " Do you sell ox blood?" " Oh, yeah." "The amount of animals that we sort of kill in the course of a week," "I wouldn't sleep on a night unless we utilized every last little bit of it." "Um, you know, if I'm taking that life, you've got to have lots of respect for the creature and use every last little bit of it." "Okay, so I'll have them here at Picnik if you need them." "Okay, bye." "So, since everything we do is local and seasonal, we change our menu all the time." "So, basically, the way that we inform customers of what we have is we update this lunch board here." "And then we hang little signs in the fridge, so people know what entree they're getting." "I feel like we work around the clock." "You know, 'cause we're always trying to keep things updated in such a small space, we're always having to re-merge things and move stuff around." "And, I mean, if you guys could see, like, how funny it is for us to, like, run out of soup and clean the soup well with our little, tiny sinks." "It's..." "It's kind of a logistical nightmare." "So we just have to try to figure out so many ways to work around it." "I mean, any time someone approaches me, and they're like, "I wanna build one of these."" "Or, "I wanna build a business around Paleo."" "It's like, you have to know..." "Especially trailer living, it's a 100-hour-a-week job." "Minimum." "Minimum." "I mean, constantly, from the day..." "The second I get up in the morning, baking, to then running the shop, to then going home, and checking in on social media, and responding to emails." "You do need proper fuel, though, to keep that, that energy going." "Otherwise, you would never be able to thrive." "I mean, I think that the only reason I'm able to work the amount I'm able to work is because the nutrition that I focus on." "So, here's the thing about saturated fat." "I am, by no means, a scientist." "I am just someone who loves butter." "I love the way that it tastes." "I love the way it makes me feel." "And the fact that I eat it every day, and it makes me feel better, it makes my brain feel clearer, and it's made my weight stabilize 25 pounds lighter than it used to be." "It makes me feel like it's a pretty awesome food." "I'm gonna be honest with you." "Suddenly, I could eat saturated fat, and I did, because I hadn't for so many..." "For such a long time." "So, I loved it." "Yeah, and I went all the way for it." "People were worried about that, and they thought, "Okay, this can't be healthy."" "Of course, I delivered proof that it did..." "that it was healthy, in fact." "It did not completely destroy my health as was predicted." "We have this notion that certain fats cause heart disease like the ones that we find in red meat and dairy products, so-called saturated fat." "That doesn't stand up either." "There really is no evidence linking saturated fat with heart disease." "All the things that we're concerned about in terms of anti-aging." "So, most women are preoccupied with this." "You know, we wanna care about our skin, and our hair, and so on." "Saturated fats are extremely important for this aspect of kind of cell development." "If you look at all the major reviews in the last few years, and there's been three or four of them, none of them actually link saturated fat with heart disease." "Oh, it's I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." "Fresh butter taste with 70% less saturated..." "When you think about it, this whole idea that saturated fat does not cause heart disease may sound vaguely heretical, okay, because we've had that drummed into us for the last 30 or 40 years." "But saturated fat is a constituent in..." "many foods, including red meat." "Now, you could argue that red meat has been in the human diet for about two and a half million years, which would lead you to conclude that saturated fat has been in the human diet for about two and a half million years." "You look at the foods that are healthy for us to eat, and they all have saturated fats in them, then what does that tell us?" "The egg white comes with an egg yolk." "The fish protein comes with the fish fat." "The animal protein comes with animal fat." "We don't eat egg whites." "We don't eat lean meat." "We don't just remove the fish oil from the fish and then eat the fish." "We eat the entire animal." "That's how it's found in nature." "That's how we're supposed to eat it." "That's the best thing for our body." "So when you look at it through that lens, it perhaps doesn't look so mad that saturated fat doesn't appear to cause heart disease at all." "People are encountering higher rates of heart disease than ever before, even though we've had 30 years of this low-fat diet mantra." "It definitely isn't working." "I'm... very excited any time I see an article in the media about how maybe saturated fat isn't that bad for us, and I feel like we're coming out of the dark ages... on at least that level." "By increasing the amount of dietary fat that I've been taking," "I've actually improved my blood profile, my blood marker profile for cholesterol and triglycerides." "That's evidence for me that this journey is worthwhile partaking." "Our overall activity level shrinks down dramatically." "So, we sit in an office for 8 to 12 hours." "Then we drive directly into a bar, sitting down again." "Sitting in a car." "Sitting in a bar." "Going home and sitting down on a couch in front of a TV." "So, basically, all we do is sitting and getting from our chair to our car or to the next chair." "The whole ethos now is to sit down at a desk and at a computer all day." "We sit in such a closed position which is terrible for our posture, terrible for our bowel function, terrible for the whole way our body just processes food, energy, blood, water." "It's a sad statement about the health of our population when people consider walking from one place to the other an exercise." "That's just how we're supposed to move, right?" "There are tons of people coming into the BOX and having no results at all or getting stuck throughout a routine at a conventional gym or commercial gym." "And then they, within the shortest time, sometimes within two to four weeks, sometimes up to 8 to 12 or 16 weeks, they get amazing results." "The most of the time, it goes hand in with an approach to better diet." "If you eat right, that's 85, 90%" "If you go for walks, that's another 5%." "But if you wanna take it to the next step, then weight-bearing exercise, anabolic exercises like weight training and sprint work would be best, or high-intensity sprints on bikes, that type of thing." "What we're doing here is we warm you up, and then we get you through a really high-intensity workout, which is, like, short but intense." "So, it's mimicking more this flight or fight mode, and it's not extensive cardio and extensive stress levels." "What you don't wanna do is chronic, repetitive, long-distance cardio." "So, events that would be more than 20 or 30 minutes." "Sprints cause a powerful, positive hormonal cascade in the body, increasing testosterone, growth hormone release, which tends to create an anabolic environment that burns fat and builds muscle." "So a sprint would be..." "I think, probably the most powerful single form of exercise you can do." "I would put it even higher than weight training." "I would put weight training just slightly below that." "Because you're using your full body." "Now, for some people who can't run sprints, the second best thing would be do sprints on an exercise bike and then combine that with weight training." "And weight training is just putting a certain set of muscles through a sprint against a weight." "If you think of counting the reps as just a way of counting time, then you just... and each rep is taking, say, three seconds, then you 10 reps, that's a 30-second activity." "So that's how you would look at weight training." "Rather than activating a small set of muscles or a small area of their body, we're just trying to make and help people get the most out of their body." "Functional movement, it's not just about lifting heavy weights and just sort of burpees, you know." "There's a lot of movement in nature that we do already that's very functional, and it's the way our body is designed to move." "Whether it's swimming in the ocean, or hiking in the mountains, or in my case, you know, I like rock climbing, because it's something very primal." "There's flow when you do it." "It's almost like a meditative state." "You know, you're using the whole body." "You're kind of playing with another object." "And it's a very social sport, almost sort of tribal... to me, anyway." "But I think people have to sort of re-evaluate what functional movement is." "Sometimes, it's just walking up the hill really fast, or climbing up a tree, or lifting heavy boxes and things like that." "You can find functional movement in everyday life." "We need to have an adequate and substantial amount of movement in order to be better aligned with our genetic heritage." "Again, looking at our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they had to move as part and parcel of their day-to-day existence." "If they didn't move, they couldn't eat." "It was as simple as that." "So today, although we don't have to hunt and gather our food as we did in the past, we still need to mimic some of those ancestral movement patterns." "So, from walking, to sprinting, to lifting heavy loads, to kind of crawling, jumping, all of the kind of fundamental movement patterns that were important then are just as important now." "There's definitely a discord between conventional workout methodology and what we should be doing according to our genetic heritage." "So, exercise today is very much about performance." "Sometimes it's seen as a way to lose weight." "Very often, it isn't seen as a way to promote good health." "Growing up, my father was completely stressed out." "But he would go "play" tennis, and it was like a chore." "Because it's like, "Aw, crap, I'm late, and I gotta rush over there."" "And now, I'm gonna play tennis, and we're gonna make it totally competitive."" "Which nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't... alleviate stress." "It's not relaxing." "And then rush home and do whatever." "Most of the practices that we follow in terms of exercise tend to be very specialist." "So, I'm a runner, so I will continue to run, and I will continue to run further distances and increase my volume." "If I'm great at playing a particular sport," "I'll spend my time and invest my time in that particular sport." "But as humans, we were designed to be movement generalists." "We weren't designed to be focused on one particular activity." "We would have to cover a wide range of movements." "I really have never related well to exercise, like, in a gym setting." "I never really have responded well to, like, pushing my body to the physical limits just to get physical results." "But I enjoy going out into nature, and moving my body, and going on hikes, and interacting with water, and trees, and wind." "And you know what?" "That, to me, I think is very kind of primal and instinctual, and something that we're kind of detached from." "Push!" "Push!" "Push!" "Come on, mate!" "Misconceptions about exercise is that it has to be punishing." "It has to be grueling." "It has to be something that you have to do as part of..." "Almost treat it as a hobby or something that you do when you have some free time." "Exercise should be, or activity most importantly, should be about integration with your day-to-day life." "It's like we..." "As adults, we're like..." "We try and schedule in our play, and you can't do that." "You have to kind of wing it a little bit." "It's not that we don't have time." "'Cause that's a crock." "We just don't know how to do it." "It's like, if I told most adults," ""All right, here's a field." "There's a tree." "There's this, there's that." "Go play."" "They'd just stand there like lumps." "They wouldn't know what to do." "They wouldn't go climb the tree, or roll around, or anything." "And it's kind of sad that we just forget how to do that." "I think you need a certain balance of not moving too much and having enough rest." "We know we're chronically under-slept and stressed." "So, if we get someone who is doing the sprint work, and they're eating right, but then they're staying up till two in the morning watching TV, it's completely counter-productive." "A lack of sleep is a great way for you to continue to have issues with managing weight." "Part of that is because your cortisol production tends to be out of whack." "Also, the hunger hormones, the ghrelin, the leptin, can also be kind of confused based on a lack of sleep." "And that can all stem from the amount of light exposure you get, the time for your melatonin production." "So if you're using a lot of electronic devices at night, your body is not prepared for sleep." "So you have less deep sleep and less REM sleep, and then the cycle kind of continues." "So sleep is extremely important, and the hormones that are kind of involved in managing sleep and managing and regulating appetite are all inter-linked." "So, as well as getting your sun exposure, vitamin D, it also lets the body know when it should be alert, and alive, and well, and also when the body should be kind of slowing down" "and preparing itself for deep sleep." "So, anything that you do outside of that or kind of out of sync with that process, may mean you're likely to increase weight, especially around the middle." "By applying a Paleo lifestyle..." "And, again, we're talking what food works best for that individual, getting your sleep down, your stress, all those things." "If you apply all of those aspects," "I think a lot of people would feel a lot better, be on a lot less medications, have a lot less in health care costs and everything else, and just a better quality of life in general." "Now, I realize that it's not about what you inherited in terms of a gene." "It's about what you decide to do in terms of gene expression, in terms of lifestyle that affects how your genes respond to your environment." "I'm gonna tell you about my first client." "Some of you have met my first client." "He worked in banking." "This person used to be diabetic." "What's interesting is after a very short-term intervention, so about six... to be fair, probably about nine months, six to nine months of intervention, which included diet, which included other lifestyle changes, including activity." "We have the after picture." "Blood pressure became optimal." "The blood glucose normalized." "Hardly any of the LDL." "Triglycerides were... dropped to the floor." "The body fat was below 10%." "Visceral fat was basically optimal again." "And they weren't suffering from all those problems in terms of weight problems." "Diagnosis at that point was, "Actually, this is pretty good."" ""Maybe this should be continued."" "Of course, some of you know that that client was me." "After conducting the Paleo diet as almost like a one-person experiment, it was all looking far better than anything else that I did." "And probably the most interesting aspect of that is" "I didn't have to resort to any medication, which was the recommendation at the time by my doctor." "Within three weeks, I felt amazing." "I no longer had IBS." "I no longer had chronic fatigue syndrome." "I no longer had pain every time I ate." "I no longer had what I thought was early-onset rheumatoid arthritis, which everybody in my family had been diagnosed with." "It was gone." "All of it was gone." "So, within about six weeks," "I lost six years' worth of fat, really, that I had accumulated through my relatively unhealthy lifestyle in medical school." "But the thing that was really noticeable was that I quite quickly, within maybe two weeks or so, had more energy than I'd experienced in really the whole of my adult life." "I just felt fundamentally a lot better." "I either had a gut, or I could see stomach muscles, one of the two." "I prefer to see stomach muscles." "I'll take that over a gut." "As a side bonus, within a week or so of starting the diet, my rash over my chest and under my arms disappeared and never came back." "In combination with changing my diet, changing my exercise program," "I was able to bring my body fat percent down 10%, increase my muscle mass very dramatically." "I used to have colds all the time." "Colds that would often lead to severe bronchitis." "After a while, I discovered just..." "I realized that they were gone." "I very rarely get ill." "When I do get ill, I recover from it a lot quicker." "My immune system is so strong that I recover much quicker, and I heal much quicker." "So I think, overall, though, yeah," "I'd say 100% health all the way." "Actually, I was in a debate the other day in..." "Ireland, and there was this nutritionist." "She turned to me when I was speaking, and she was like, "I would like to see your cholesterol values."" "Or, "I would like to see your blood work." Yeah." "And actually, I answered her." "I said, "My blood values are, are perfect."" ""They're much better than when I was a vegetarian for 10 years."" "My doctor always tells me that I'm in excellent health." "And this is very different than before as being a vegetarian." "So over the years, what I've seen is many individuals try this dietary approach and have fundamental changes in not just their weight, but their wellness, their energy, their wellbeing." "If you look at their blood work, that generally improves as well." "When we started our practice, and I started actually implementing it and saw dramatic changes in people's lives, then that..." "And not just one, but everybody that we dealt with." "Then I realized that that was a very powerful tool." "More powerful than anything that I'd ever done previously as a physician." "Just teaching people how to eat." "Simple." "Yeah." "So, look, there is no such thing as a panacea." "But in all my time as a practicing doctor," "I don't think I've seen anything that comes as close to it as this." "When I started eating Paleo," "I had a pretty low budget... and I still could do that." "You can find alternatives to everything." "You don't need to eat grass-fed beef every day." "Essentially, meat, fish, fruits, and vegetables." "And then everyone can do that." "Pork chops and some vegetables, or I make some kind of stew, or braise, or pulled pork that I can throw in the oven and forget about, and roast chickens." "You can have a healthy diet if your major protein and fat sources were fish and eggs." "So it doesn't have to be meat." "I eat so many different things that I never ate before." "There's more than enough to replace the foods that I don't eat anymore." "I think just about any chef would be completely thrilled to be given a basket of Paleo ingredients, 'cause they're really high-quality." "And you're cooking with really good meats, and really good vegetables, and local, seasonal produce." "Sometimes if I'm trying to recreate a dish from my childhood or an ethnic Thai dish that I want to be exactly how I remember it, it's about playing with flavors, and balances, and textures." "That's hugely important to me is... making sure that people get to keep that experience of food." "It's really strange to call it a diet, because it's not actually a diet." "It's just a way of eating." "And I think the connotation with the "diet" is that it's in some way restrictive and in some way, bland and boring." "You know, you cut out lots of those things." "You know, now, I love cooking with things like cauliflower, and beet root, and celeriac, artichokes, endives, things that I probably never used to eat before." "You know, it'd be broccoli, and carrots, and your typical kind of three veg and a meat." "Whereas now, I get to experiment with lots of new herbs, and spices, and different techniques, and sort of applying that to sort of whole foods." "You know, you wanna keep it varied, so you try out different cuisines," "cooking with different seafood and different fish." "That's exciting to me, and I think that's what I love about cooking Paleo." "I have discovered the Paleo diet." "I was overwhelmed by it." "I, per se, wanted to make it the center of my life." "And we rediscovered the joy of eating, of cooking." "Wanted to share that." "So we tried out to... you know, to run a small restaurant." "We never expected it to become so well-known and so popular." "A lot of people come with a certain prejudice." "They heard about the Paleo diet." "They hear the word "diet,"" "which actually, I don't like to use either, and they immediately think of health food, which is, by definition, not so tasty, and they think of restriction." "They came for the theatrical side of it." "They expected to be served by someone wearing fur and on stone plates." "Then they come to our restaurant, and they see abundance, abundance in colors, abundance in flavors." "And they were surprised by the fact that it was quite..." "a nice and normal environment with great food." "They can feast on food." "That is, for many people, an eye-opener that makes them enthusiastic, of course." "Plus, they can eat fat..." "Which carries flavor." "I mean, it's an essential part of a meal." "We try to not make it boring at all and very exciting." "People get surprised when they visit my website, because it's not even for people that eat Paleo." "It's just good food made with whole foods ingredients and good flavors, you know, lots of herbs, and spices, and things like that." "I think what I'm trying to do, with me running my food blog and publishing cookbooks, is actually trying to show people that eating healthy or living healthy is not boring." "You're not missing out on anything." "You know, I think the perception is that the diets are temporary." "It's a Band-Aid solution to fix the problem." "It's like taking a pill." "What I'm trying to show it can be a sustainable..." "It has longevity." "It can be a sort of everlasting type of, way of eating and living." "And it's varied." "It's practical." "It's accessible." "And it's very much doable by anyone." "And so, if I can change people's perception about healthy eating and healthy living, that it's not sort of just for the elite few, it can be applied to any kind of lifestyle, budget," "country, location, gender, then hopefully, I've done my job well." "I've ordered some biltong for it, but we just need to add to the order." "It's gonna be here on Friday." "Okay." "There should have been an extra in that last lot." "Yeah, there was." "I used it." "Oh..." "For what?" "That packs?" "Uh, no, that's included in what we needed to order." "Right." "Okay." "The growth over a short period of time has been huge." "Our trade sales have increased month on month, and our website sales have, again, increased month on month." "We haven't actually had a month that we've gone backwards." "Even continuing for Christmas and all that sort of stuff as well." "We've been overwhelmed by the growth of it and the reception and the feedback that we've been getting as well." "I guess that's what gets us up every morning is not only do we wanna provide the best products that we can to people, but part of what we do is trying to help educate people." "The growth of the channel and of the BOX is telling me that we're doing the right thing at the right time." "So, people are having their eyes opened for it and their minds opened for it, and they're open for new things." "What drives me is the fact that I'm so passionate about this movement." "I mean, it has changed my life in so many ways." "It's built self-confidence, it's eliminated health problems, and it just makes me feel awesome." "And so, I just feel this dire need to, like, translate that to our customers and get people excited and encouraged about doing something that's gonna help them." "That's what drives me every day." "I would not put my heart and my soul into this business and all of these resources and all of these finances if I didn't believe in what I was doing." "There aren't that many places in the world where like-minded people can congregate, and get together, and share, not just their ideas and experiences, but sort of the emotion that goes along with how you feel living this way." "So it's quite powerful." "It's quite empowering to be able to get here and, uh, and share stories and hear other people's stories about the amazing transformations they've made in their lives." "Yes, people make choices that they maybe shouldn't have, but you know what?" "We still have answers, and it's better for them if they're out of that mess, better for our country." "It's better for everybody if they're fixed, and they're healed instead of giving them drugs and telling them, "Sorry, you're just gonna have to live in a wheelchair", and this is your life, and the quality of your life doesn't matter."" "Bullshit." "Bullshit." "I'm sorry." "That's just not right." "The reason why Keith and I do what we do here at Paleo f is to reach as many people as possible." "I will get on the highest roof and scream the loudest if I have to, but what I do is to try to save as many people as I possibly can." "And I feel like the reason that I have to do that is because conventional wisdom has gotten us to this point, and the only way out is by helping people understand there's a better way." "At that time, for me to find the Paleo diet," "I had to search, and search, and search." "I wanted to get more awareness out there." "It was like it's harder to find, and so I thought it would be really easy to find if it was just staring at somebody on a... counter or on a, on a magazine rack at a checkout aisle." "And so, I thought, "Okay, well, let's, um..." "Let's just do the magazine,"" "and my wife, of course, thought I was an idiot, because..." "I have zero design experience or... publishing experience, or anything." "I wanted to get in front of people where they needed it." "So, the guy or the gal pushing out their cart of processed crap from whatever grocery store," "I wanted them to see a cover." "Hopefully, they look at it." "They grab it." "Those are the people I wanted to see." "Not the CrossFitting, uh..." "You know, person who's already following Paleo kind of stuff." "I wanna provide information for them as well, but at the time, I wanted to reach people that maybe needed it more than those people that have kind of already found it." "As human beings, we have far more in common with each other." "Regardless of where we're from, regardless of our racial heritage, we have far more in common, from a DNA point of view, than what separates us." "And so, believing that this diet is optimal for humans," "I believe that anyone and everyone will benefit from the Paleo diet." "Paleo is for everyone, and it should be for everyone." "I mean, there is such a health care crisis in this country with obesity, and chronic conditions, and sickness, that if everyone just paid a little bit more attention to what they put in their mouth," "I think we could 100% combat that." "If you wanna lose weight, improve your performance as an athlete, everyone can get benefits from it." "Changing your sleeping habits, running outside, or doing more movements, reducing your stress as much as possible, actually getting out in the sun regularly, and getting in touch with nature and being outdoors, not using technology as much as well." "Um, and I think when people combine that with the food, they'll really feel the positive effects that it has on their wellbeing and their sort of longevity." "Aging is about inflammation." "And if you keep your diet clean, it's anti-inflammatory." "And so, it is an anti-aging diet." "And it's designed for the duration of your life." "You need to cut out the grains, and you need to cut out dairy, and you need to cut out vegetable oils." "The first thing you do is you start at zero, right?" "You get rid of all the poisons, you bring in the good stuff, and you start from there." "Cutting out grains, and sugars, and legumes, all that kind of stuff, and doing it for 30 days is good." "Everybody should do that." "And that's just because those are the biggest-offending things, or some of them are just... horrible, food-like items that nobody should eat anyway." "But you gotta pull all that stuff out for 30 days just to reset." "Because you can't listen to your own body and..." ""Oh, this makes me feel good." "This makes me feel bad."" "Unless you get that baseline kind of reset thing going." "Get rid of the all the poisons and toxins in your environment." "Just think of it as like spring cleaning." "Except that you haven't done your spring cleaning in 47 years, right?" "Knowing what to look for." "Like, if you go into a shop, it's really easy to go down one aisle and make a bad choice than go down another aisle and make a better choice." "Shift the emphasis more towards foods that are natural, unprocessed, primal, Paleo, generally lower-carb foods, okay." "So, we're looking at things like meat, and fish, and eggs, and vegetables." "People over-complicate things." "It's just natural food." "It's just what you can go and buy from your butcher's, from your green grocer." "Try buying food and eating food that still looks like what it..." "like what it is originally, like as the source of the food." "For some people, if they even think about cutting out a certain food, they shut down." "So, I think what I usually encourage people to do is just take baby steps and not make it so all or nothing." "Least one thing that could be considered here is to take the two main meals of the day, say lunch and evening meal, and convert them into something looking like Paleo." "Just try to replace the idea in your head that you cannot do that with "I can do something much better."" "Just the fact that you're reducing your reliance on processed foods and manufactured foods, you're gonna be seeking food from better sources, is gonna improve your health." "Make a commitment to learning how to cook the foods that you like, and you start to experiment, and you take the time, and you get on the Internet and do some research." "You can buy some recipes books or some cookbooks." "And then you stay with it long enough so that you can have an intimate and intuitive relationship with your own body and to know whether things are good or bad for you." "Take some blood panel work and do a snapshot before and after, and then you can see what the results are for yourself." "See how you look, feel, and perform." "I mean, you have nothing to lose but to possibly... get healthier, feel better, lose weight... you know, if you have any diseases, possibly reverse them." "Whatever the reasons behind..." "Whether it's the science, whether it's, you know, another person's experience, if that works for you, and you're seeing an improvement based on your blood work, and based on, you know, reduction in body fat," "and improvement in body composition, then it's something you're likely to want to continue." "I cannot make you worse by giving you real food, whole food." "I mean, you know, what's the downside to that?" "Even if you eat meat now, then you're more likely to chose better qualities, and better cuts of meat, and more healthy sources of meat." "You recognize that what..." "the animal that you eat, whatever they're eating also contributes to their health." "You will just, I guess, feel more in touch with where your food comes from." "And I think you don't need rocket science for that." "If you eat more good food..." "that's great." "If you're still eating some of the things that you used to eat, it's way better than just eating all of that, because you're so afraid to make any changes at all." "Once you start to be consciously aware of what you're eating, and then you apply that to your internal environment, then you realize you're gonna have to make some changes." "Or if you're not gonna be able to make those changes, willingly accept the consequences of your actions." "If you start something, make sure you last long enough to feel a change." "So, don't skip on the first days, or after 10 days, "Oh, it doesn't work."" "Like, after two weeks, you cannot say if a diet works on not." "And "diet" not in terms of really "dieting,"" "but, like, in terms of nourishing your body and eating." "Starting off by implementing the diet, you're more likely to use that as a gateway to other areas of your lifestyle that will also improve." "You're more likely to start thinking about activity levels and increasing those." "You're more likely to start questioning the type of products you have in your household." "You know, the toxicity of those." "You're more likely to consider, "Okay, you know", maybe I am drinking too much, and I need to moderate that."" "There are other areas of your lifestyle that I believe will be looked at in more detail when you embark on this journey." "It's gonna get better, not worse." "So, that's how I would look at it." "It's a lifetime commitment." "Just go out and have fun." "It's a marvelous lifestyle, which brings so much more to your life, really." "That's kind of the only thing I can tell somebody." "I mean, do you wanna feel better or not?" "I don't know." "Paleo came into my life, because my whole life, I've struggled with weight." "I was 300 pounds." "My face was super-round." "I was 285 to 290 pounds." "I was lethargic, and, you know, just sleepy, and just kind of walking through life." "I've been "diagnosed" with cancer, lupus." "I used to be on lots of steroids." "I used to have to inject morphine into myself." "About two and a half years ago, I found the Paleo lifestyle." "I resisted it." "I resisted..." "vehemently at first." "I though it was, like, the craziest thing you could think of." ""This is ridiculous." "I believe in vegetarianism."" "One day, I decided to take it all into my own hands." "Find out what works for me, what doesn't." "That's how I found out about Paleo." "I had to make a change in the way I was eating, the way I was living." "Okay, we're throwing away everything." "We're starting new." "My light came on." "I figured it out." "I was like, "This makes so much sense."" "I've lost 80 pounds within one year." "Got to run a mile for the first time in my life." "I started exercising." "I made more and more food choices." "It's me, you know." "My mood isn't determined on if I just had a insulin spike or not." "Within a few months, I was doing 5Ks, and obstacle course races, and crazy stuff like that." "I have progressive MS." "And I went from full-time care to basically, I'm completely self-sufficient." "And there's so much more to it than just going and eating... you know, eating, getting the cravings, put something in your stomach." "It's all about focusing on your body." "I now believe that Paleo is about nourishment." "More so than I believe that it's about elimination, or about being thin." "Natural patterns, natural eating... and a life that's genuinely worth living." "I completely got my life back, and I continue to heal, and I believe that self-care is health care, and food is medicine." "And I just want the whole world to know that." "The things that make my body feel the best and the things that make me feel more like myself are the things that are closest to nature." "And really, the Paleo diet covers all of that, and it makes me feel more alive, more happy." "I got..." "I got everything that I lost back." "And what I needed was to... think about Paleo in a way that was... about enriching my body and my spirit." "Literally, everything I am now in life or everything I'm doing has been traced back to that moment where I kind of discovered this whole thing." "Step in." "Get your toe wet somewhere." "It's all about eating clean, playing often, and crushing life." "It's really fun." "It's like a whole new life." "This is..." "This is it." "Some form of it is it." "There's just really no way that I can pay back except sharing it with others." "**"