Welcome to A Balanced You and the 21 Day Challenge!
I started A Balanced You because I wanted to help people take the hassle out of getting healthy.
Don’t get me wrong.
This isn’t one of those “eat ice cream and chocolate cake and just take this pill and watch the weight melt off” hustles.
This is about learning how to work with your body’s natural wiring instead of against it.
Let me explain what I mean.
We’ve been given some pretty sketchy advice about diet and exercise for years and it hasn’t been serving us well.
We’ve been told to eat our heart-healthy whole grains even though that’s not a natural fuel for our metabolic engine.
It’s like filling up the gas tank of a Ferrari with chocolate pudding and then being surprised when it won’t run.
We evolved during the two and a half million years of the Paleolithic period.
Basically, the period just preceding the advent of agriculture 8-10,000 years ago.
Our genetic cake was baked prior to grain, corn or beans became a dietary mainstay.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, lifespan and general health actually diminished when we went from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agrarian one.
Pulitzer Prize winner, Jared Diamond, calls agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”
Relax
I’m not going to suggest that we abandon civilization and start foraging for our food, but what I am suggesting is that we have to figure out how to better manage our food, movement and recovery strategies so that they work with our inherited Homo sapiens blueprint instead of against it.
I’m suggesting A Balanced You.
During the 21-day challenge, we’ll talk about the differences between Paleo, Primal and Keto, but we’re going to focus on what I call the OG Diet – Original Grocer. We’re going to focus on eating what people ate before there was a grocery store every few miles full of 87 brands of breakfast cereal and food that has to tell you it’s healthy on its label so maybe you won’t realize all of the sketchy stuff that in it.
We’ll also look at the magic of exercising and how gains can happen even when you keep your heart rate relatively low.
And we’ll look at the benefit of periodically cranking your heart rate up for brief periods of time with a series of short sprints.
We’re also going to talk about recovery and sleep.
Do you know someone that says that they’ll sleep when they’re dead?
Unfortunately, they may not have to wait as long as they think.
You’ll learn why it’s critical that you make sleep a priority. We’ll also talk about getting out and moving, lifting heavy things, getting some sunshine, and different strategies for dealing with stress.
Thanks for joining the 21-day challenge.
I look forward to helping you create your version of A Balanced You.