Allow Me To Bore You With My Vacation Photos

Last year's trip to the Ancestral Health Symposium in L.A. was super-educational, but I enjoyed PaleoFX less for the content and more for the opportunity to connect with old and new friends. I was primarily in Austin to support M as she prepared for her panels and cooking demonstration, so my focus wasn't on figuring out whether Jack Kruse is a visionary or a loon, or whether safe starches are in fact safe. Yes, I learned a bunch of new stuff (more on that later), but for the most part, I treated this as my Paleo vacation. And although I had a bit of a nasty cold throughout my time in Austin, the warm weather, meaty eats, and insanely great company made it a trip to remember.

Rather than trying to describe the experience in words, here are a crapload of snapshots (by me and Bobby Gill) that summarize our latest Paleo nerd-a-thon:

Wandering around the University of Texas at Austin

The Salt Lick in Driftwood

M & Melicious

A big pile o' meat!

A few of our housemates at Paleo Blogger Nerd Central: Diane Sanfilippo, George Bryant, Bobby Gill, Hayley Mason and Bill Staley, M (Not pictured: Liz Wolfe, Spence Wartman, Diana Rodgers, Stacy Toth, Laura Schoenfeld)

Nom Nom Sox

Post-WOD photo at CrossFit Austin

More after the jump...

"This Is Not A Fad"

The first two installments of our local CBS affiliate's five-part series on Paleo eating are up, featuring Loren Cordain, Robert Lustig, Lynda Frassetto, and Tara Grant -- and including some footage from this year's Ancestral Health Symposium.

Check 'em out:

Bonus points if you can spot a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot of M in one of the videos!

Reclaiming Play: One-Day MovNat Fundamentals Workshop

After eight hours of MovNat yesterday, I knew I was going to be a wreck this morning. And sure enough, I woke up with soreness in places I didn't even know existed. My upper arms and knees are covered with splotchy purple bruises, and my forearms are sunburnt and flecked with small scratches. My lower back is stiff, and my shoulders are sore. And to top it all off, the bottom of my left foot is still pulsing and swollen from a bee sting. (Note to self: It turns out that bees don't like being stepped on.)

But if I had to do it all over again, would I? Hell to the yes.



I first came across MovNat back in January of 2010, when -- in the same New York Times article that introduced me to Paleo eating -- I read about Erwan Le Corre and a physical fitness system he'd created called MovNat. MovNat is short for "Mouvement Naturel" or "natural movement." Inspired by Méthode Naturelle, an approach to survival fitness pioneered at the turn of the last century by Georges Hébert (a forefather of parkour and freerunning), Le Corre developed a program that re-trains people to move according to human nature. Simply put, MovNat is about moving your body as nature intended, and doing so as efficiently, safely and practically as possible.



For a good introduction to MovNat, check out Le Corre's 2009 profile in Men's Health magazine.

MovNat is founded on three "pillars" of movement: Natural, Evolutionary, and Situational. As such, it's a system that aims to respect the environment, align with our biological heritage, and have practical application to real-world challenges. Particularly with regard to its emphasis on situational adaptiveness, MovNat overlaps to a large degree with programs like CrossFit; both, after all, focus on developing well-rounded athletes who are ready at a moment's notice to tackle a broad spectrum of physical demands.

MovNat has grown in the past couple of years, with Le Corre bringing a small handful of employees on board to teach seminars and to run much of the day-to-day operations of the business. Still, he continues to be MovNat's guru (and greatest marketing asset), and at the Ancestral Health Symposium a couple of weeks ago, he delivered a terrific presentation about the benefits of natural movement:



At the Symposium, I got the chance to meet Le Corre and his U.S.-based Master Trainer, Clifton Harski, and they encouraged me to join MovNat's one-day Fundamentals Workshop in Palo Alto. I'd been curious about MovNat for almost two years, and a "primal" fitness system sounds like something that's right up my alley, so I figured: Why not? Besides, M got invited by Clif to join, too -- and we live less than two miles from the neighborhood park where the Workshop was to be held.

Before showing up yesterday, my only in-person exposure to MovNat was at a brief movement session that Clif led at UCLA at the end of the Symposium. Out on a grassy field, we did some barefoot walking and crawling in the grass, and we practiced jumping. I found the emphasis on precision of movement to be challenging, but it's not like we ran across treetops or dangled from vines or anything. I didn't feel like a character in Avatar. "This stuff doesn't seem all that special," I thought.

I was wrong.

Almost as soon as we arrived yesterday, Clif had us dive right into climbing up poles at the park. "This isn't what we'd normally start with," he noted, "but we need to finish climbing before kids come take over the playground." (See? MovNat is adaptive!)

(Click any of the photos to enlarge)

Climbing, it turns out, is incredibly fun. Keeping our arms (relatively) relaxed, we braced ourselves against poles with our feet, walked up vertically until we were able to grab a horizontal beam, swung ourselves hand-over-hand to the other side, and then climbed back down another pole. Even if I'd walked away from the Workshop with nothing more than the personal satisfaction derived from scrambling up a pole, it would have been totally worth it. It's been years since I saw a pole and had any urge to climb it, but after yesterday, I'm not sure it'll be so easy to walk past one without pausing to consider going vertical.

Next, we invaded the kids' swing sets, taking turns to pull ourselves up and over the top beam using a series of progressions. Clif taught us to rest our forearms on the horizontal bar and then -- using rotational force -- screw our arms down and outward to engage our lats and propel ourselves up and forward.

It was kind of magical -- even though I sucked at it. Clif also showed us how to hook a leg over the bar and leverage the momentum generated by our other leg to flip over the bar. I was pretty terrible at that, too, but it was a blast.

More after the jump...

Ancestral Health Symposium 2011

This past weekend was nuts, y'all.

Months and months ago, M (a.k.a. Nom Nom Paleo) bought tickets for the inaugural Ancestral Health Symposium at UCLA. Organized by the brand-spankin'-new non-profit Ancestral Health Society, the sold-out Symposium was described by Loren Cordain as "the Woodstock of Evolutionary Medicine" -- an apt description, given the collection of eminent scientists, educators, authors and bloggers who gathered to discuss health, nutrition and fitness from the perspective of evolutionary biology.

Still, I prefer to call it "The League of Paleo Superheroes." Seriously -- it was like Comic-Con for us Paleo nerds.

M and I hit the road on Thursday, driving down to L.A. from the Bay Area in time to catch dinner at Animal with the awesome and trading-card-famous Melicious of The Clothes Make The Girl, her talented and dryly funny husband Dave, and the dynamic super-duo behind the Whole9, Melissa and Dallas.

(Click on any of the images below to enlarge.)

We ate just about everything on the menu. And no, I'm not kidding. (See M's rundown of the food here.)

I can't say enough good stuff about these guys -- their warmth, wit, charisma and humor are off the charts (as is their ability to gobble up various animal parts with abandon). 

In case you're wondering, we all ate stuff that was less than Paleo -- Melissa and Dallas included. (Sadly, corn tortillas weren't on the menu.) And yet they somehow made it to UCLA's Ackerman Ballroom (the main venue for the Symposium) bright and early the next morning, looking fine and dandy and not at all effed up from their eff-off meal.

We were feeling pretty excited about the start of the Symposium, too, as evidenced by M's big grin:

After we got ourselves registered, we ran into more of our Paleo super-pals, like Chowstalker's Patty and her husband, Ron... 

...and our ridiculously talented friends responsible for The Food Lovers Primal Palate, Bill & Haley. We think the world of these guys.

After opening remarks by UCLA's Aaron Blaisdell, the President of the Ancestral Health Society, Boyd Eaton delivered the keynote. Over a quarter-century ago, Eaton co-authored a pioneering paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that helped launch the Paleo movement, and will always command respect as a pioneer. 

Nonetheless, I felt that his presentation at the Symposium -- which argued that modern problems as far-ranging and varied as gender equality, pollution and ethnic violence are rooted in our departure from Stone Age lifestyles -- veered a bit too far into "noble savage" territory. While Eaton made some interesting points (particularly about Paleolithic nutrition), I'm not persuaded that hunter-gatherers were altogether inclusive of all people, that cavemen societies were universally more enlightened about gender equality than modern ones, or that China's government-enforced "One-Child" policy deserves a big high-five.

Another pioneer of the Paleo movement, Loren Cordain, was next, and delivered a solid presentation about the epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases in westernized countries, and how these afflictions are virtually non-existent in hunter-gatherer societies. For most Paleo geeks, there wasn't anything particularly new or earth-shattering in Cordain's talk, but the broad scope of his lecture nicely set the stage for later presentations.

Staffan Lindeberg was next. I enjoyed hearing him discuss his groundbreaking 1989 study of the hunter-gatherers on Kitava in Papua New Guinea, and how they remained untouched by heart disease, stroke, Type II diabetes, and other diseases of western civilization. Most fascinating, of course, is the fact that the Kitavans stayed free of these health issues despite their high carbohydrate intake, suggesting that food choice trumps macronutrient selection.

[The slides from this presentation can be viewed here.]



More -- LOTS more -- after the jump...

Home!

I know I still owe you a summary of Days 2 and 3 of the CrossFit Games, as well as a recap of this weekend's Ancestral Health Symposium, but after driving all day, I'm just too zonked to blog tonight. For the past week and a half, I've been sitting waaaay too much (in cars, stadiums and lecture halls), eating on the road, sleeping very little, and not exercising much at all. And frankly, after spending so much time away from home, hanging out with these two little guys was much higher on my priority list than blogging:

Off to bed. Back to our regularly-scheduled programming tomorrow.

Dining with My Twitter Feed

M (a.k.a. Nom Nom Paleo) and I shared a great meat-tastic dinner last night at Jar with a good number of Paleo blog superheroes in attendance at the Ancestral Health Symposium, including

• Bill & Hayley (The Food Lover's Primal Palate)
• Diane (Balanced Bites)
• Julie & Charles (Paleo Comfort Foods)
• Patty & Ron (Chowstalker)
• Badier (The Lazy Caveman)
• Caitlin (Grassfed Girl)
• Henry & Jo (Nutty Kitchen)

It was all kinds of awesome to hang out -- live! -- with a good chunk of my Twitter feed over humongous plates of meat. If you're a Paleo eater and don't already follow these guys, you're missing out.

I'm sure a full account of our dinner will show up soon on Nom Nom Paleo soon. Okay, back to the Paleo nerd fest...

Offal-y Good

Gotta hit the sack. I'm back in L.A. tonight (this time, with M) for the Ancestral Health Symposium, and we had an enormous meat orgy of a dinner at Animal tonight with Melissa and Dallas of Whole9 and Melissa Joulwan of The Clothes Make the Girl. We ate nose-to-tail tonight (including brains, face, ears, pancreas, liver, heart, marrow and tails), and all that tasty organ meat in my belly is making me drowsy.

Read all about our feast o' flesh over at Nom Nom Paleo.