Daily Archives: March 4, 2013

On Saturday I spent most of the day at the Everyday Paleo Seminar that my gym hosted listening to Sarah Fragoso and Jason Seib speak about the science behind Paleo and real life strategies for incorporating it into your life. Since I’ve embraced Paleo living for almost 3 years now I wasn’t expecting to go in and have my mind blown, but I was hoping to get a little re-energized.

For about 6 months I’ve been feeling stuck, health wise. I guess you could say I’ve been in a little bit of a rut. Mostly, to me, this means that I am making less forward progress than I would like and instead am doing more floundering than usual. But every time I start to feel upset with myself about all the floundering I’m doing, I think of this:

This is so true, right?

When I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels I try to realize that it is all a part of the process and then I just look for an opportunity to re-energize myself to move forward. This seminar really helped me do that.

It is a pretty great introduction to Paleo if you are not super familiar with it, but like I said, I already came pretty armed with the basics. I did write down a few notes and found myself evaluating a things I could do a little differently moving forward so I thought I’d share my random list of things that made me say “Oh, really?” This isn’t chronological in any way, or even good cliffs notes, but rather just a few facts I learned and bullets that got me thinking:

*I should to get back to my Vitamin D supplement
I used to be super good about this and then I got a little lazy. It’s pretty important though, so I’ll probably start supplementing again. I’m actually mostly anti-supplements (unless they are targeted and temporary), but this is an exception – and the dosage I used to take was recommended by my Naturopath so it wasn’t arbitrary. Jason recommended Liquid Vitamin D drops as the bio-availability is far superior.

*Chicken/Pork and Turkey are slightly higher in Omega 6s than Beef & Seafood
I thought this was interesting. Their recommendation for the best protein sources were good beef and wild caught cold water fish. Of course they weren’t saying ONLY eat those two things, but to just consider that when selecting your variety.

*Selenium makes the Mercury in fish inert
This was kind of a fun fact too, I thought. If you are getting enough selenium, you really don’t need to be fraught with worry about mercury in your fish.

*Focus on Fat Loss and not Weight Loss
I’ve mentioned this sentiment numerous times here but the more I hear it, the more I want to pump my fist in the air when people say it. And Jason walked through the science of why lifting weights is so good for your body and why “cardio” does a lot more harm than good when it comes to getting healthy. Of course I can’t explain it in an articulate way, but it did make me feel a little more energized to lift.

*Skinny is not the opposite of fat. Healthy is the opposite of fat. Healthy is also the opposite of skinny.
Pursue health over aesthetics and the aesthetics will come.

*You can eat super clean and work out really hard but if you are not managing stress and getting good sleep, none of it matters
This was especially powerful for me to hear. It is something I know, and something that I have worked hard on in the past (especially getting good sleep — and now I’m a pro! haha) but definitely with this new job I need to make sure I am keeping my stress in check! Jason recommended this book and I ordered it from Amazon while I was still at the seminar. I love technology!

*****

So, like I said — not great cliffs notes or anything, but just a few of the things I left thinking about. It’s nice to get re-energized about your health and this definitely gave me some new food for thought. It’s nice to be thinking about some of this stuff again.