I’m not going to be one of those who promises a cure, but I am going to offer you a thought to see if maybe, just maybe you can actually get those bumps to go away. ‘Cuz it ain’t normal to have bumpy skin – I don’t care what doctor tells you, “that’s just the way you are,” that’s NOT just the way you are and you may be able to do something about it. After trying to get rid of the bumps on my arms for as many years as I’ve been alive and aware that I had weird bumps on me, I finally got mine to go away – so who knows – this just may work for you too. But maybe not, because there’s waaaay more to optimal health than just 1 cure-all ‘fix’, so don’t hate on me if you still have bumps after trying what I did.

First let me tell you what I did that didn’t work: I scrubbed w/ a hard brush in the shower, I used one of those soaps that has “acne medicine” in it, I switched my sunscreen, I tried laying in the sun more(in case I wasn’t getting ENOUGH vitD), I tried picking them (for the love of all things holy, do not do this!!!), I tried using alpha-hydroxy pads meant for peeling layers of dead skin off your aged-face on the backs of my arms, I switched to an all-natural soap (like seriously all-natural, practically make-it-yourself all-natural, castile soap w/ no fragrances), I switched my lotion from the pretty-smelling ones to a plain lotion (again, all-natural, no gluten, no parabens, etc), I switched my detergent to an all-natural, unscented one, I tried just about every do-it-yourself scrub routine listed in whatever glossy mag landed on my doorstep each month.

So when I tell you I tried a lot of things, I really did. Maybe I can spare you the time I wasted…none of them worked.

Could It Really Be ALL About Diet?

When we (Drew and I) first began considering the pros of switching from a gluten-free diet to a paleo diet, one of the things Robb Wolf talked a lot about in his podcasts (which are free ya’ll and you’re crazy if you don’t download them, those things are science-as-told-by-your-smart-ass-best-friend-who-when-half-drunk-is-still-smarter-than-you-solid-gold) was skin irritations from eczema to acne that were cured after going on a paleo diet, specifically, an auto-immune protocol of the diet. **Also get Robb’s podcasts via your smartphone in iTunes by searching “Robb Wolf”**

First off, a paleo diet is essentially an anti-inflammatory diet – as in – you eat foods that are rich in ANTI-inflammatory properties, and you avoid foods that are PRO-inflammatory. Foods that are anti-inflammatory are high-quality meats/fish, veggies & fruits, and certain fats (especially coconut oil, which is anti-bacterial, sort of ‘scrubbing you out’ from the inside when consumed, and thus why some homeopathic cancer diets recommend consuming daily Tbsp’s of straight coconut oil).

Foods that are PRO-inflammatory are grains (highly acidic AND contain a large protein called lectin, which wiggles its way through the gut lining of the majority of humans, essentially leaving the barn door open for the lectins and all the other food particles to get out & begin circulating in your body. This sets off your immune response to attack anything that looks like the food particles, and unfortunately in the process, it ends up attacking your human cells too. Some people think they have no issues with grains, but most actually are having symptoms that have become ‘normal’ parts of aging & will become noticeable once a person goes without grains for 30 days to see how “normal” begins to change for them.), dairy (which also contains gut irritants, especially casein, which is similar in size and function to gluten), legumes (peanuts & beans, which also contain lectins), sugar, processed foods, and soy.

This allows the gut lining to begin to heal and close itself so that food particles are no longer escaping into the bloodstream and setting off an immune reaction in other areas of your body, like the organs, tissues, joints, and brain. I figured I had nothing to lose by giving it a shot – because really – what’s 30 days if it means I start to see some results. I think even the most skeptical person can grant that 30 days is not that long when it could mean your health and life take a turn for the better. And if giving up those addictive grains & cheese is just too much for you, then you’re just not sick enough to try. ‘Cuz when people are searching, really searching, for an answer..they’re willing to try even the “craziest” of ideas, like giving up grains. The symptoms are THAT BAD that giving up grains holds enough potential to give it a shot….and for me, bumps on my arms were a symptom that something was going on “under the hood” that may become a much more serious issue down the road. For instance, what if the bloat or bumps or GERD is a symptom of your immune system saying “hey! the check engine light is ON! achtung!” And you’re all “m’eh, that’s just the way I am.” So your body 1o years from now is all “ok, told ya so, I can’t take it anymore…insert disease HERE.”

I digress…my point is that I was willing to try because what did I have to lose? Nothing else had made the bumps on my arms go away, may as well try. So I followed a paleo diet for 30 days. And I haven’t stopped following a paleo diet since then. And it’s been 13 months now, and shocker of shockers, I am almost bump-free!

Be Your Own Science Experiment

My arms started clearing after I seriously reduced my egg consumption, as well as my nut consumption. Some folks who lean more into the auto-immune condition camp also have cross-reactions to compounds in nuts, eggs, and nightshades (tomatoes/potatoes). So I eliminated them 1 by 1 from my diet for a period of time, and then re-introduced them to see what happened. Eggs & nuts seemed to have the biggest response for me in arm bumpy-ness. Eat them a lot (several times per week), and I have bumps. Eat eggs 2-3x/month and stick mainly to macadamia nuts (which are lowest in n-6 fatty acids as compared to other nuts, which are quite high in the not-so-awesome n-6 fatty acids) & my body does well. My conclusion is that large doses of egg proteins and excessive n-6, especially from nuts, seems to flare up my immune system by raising little pilaris kerastosis bumps on my arms.

And it wasn’t just my backs of my arms that began changing for the better. Within 30 days of going paleo, my face became much brighter and clearer. I never had acne on my face (thank GOD!) but my skin was dull and I had dark circles under my eyes, for which I used every under-eye concealer and lotion out there. I started getting asked what I was doing for my skin. I stopped wearing any under-eye concealer, I stopped wearing any kind of base/bronzer, except when I was doing night-out make-up when bronzer is an obvious must.

Stick It Out – This is Not Miracle-ville

While I hoped my bumps would be gone after 30, 60, or even 90 days – I saw modest improvements in the overall bumpy-ness  over that time period – it was really closer to 6 months when my arms started more fully clearing.

(Side note: I had LOTS of other things I was hoping would improve on an anti-inflammatory/paleo-style diet, and they did improve – DRAMATICALLY – which is why I stuck with this way of eating. I also stuck with it because, having taken numerous nutrition courses in college and having tried the low-fat/carb-based diet that is recommended by the USDA & having looked into vegetarianism – there simply isn’t another way of eating that makes this much sense. The science is there. I can’t say the same for the USDA rec’s and while I appreciate vegetarians’ approach to ‘love all things on Earth’, they’re wrong about meat being the problem when it comes to long-term health. The fact is, eating an anti-inflammatory diet is easy to do for the rest of your life. It’s not a “diet”, it’s not super restrictive, and it re-directs our intuition back to hearing our body’s real signals of hunger, satiety, “feeling good”, and overall health.)

And being able to do this for the long-haul is important…because as I found with my own Kerastosis Pilaris, it takes a while for the body to truly begin healing YEARS of improper nutrition. Did you know it can take 5 years for a gluten-intolerant individual to heal their gut from the damage of eating gluten up to the point of diagnosis? 5 years to get back to restored health. Most people are far too impatient to go the long haul, but I encourage you to not be an impatient type & see what is really possible with a change to your diet and/or lifestyle. It’s not a death sentence to make changes to your diet and lifestyle if it means you actually get MORE years on your life and BETTER quality years from the changes you’ve made.

So for my fellow Kerastosis Pilaris friends out there, consider what a change to your diet could do for your skin. And for everyone who never had to hide the little bumps on their arms, what symptoms that you’ve grown to consider “normal” may be positively affected by changing some part of your diet/lifestyle? You’re the driver in this life, why settle for “that’s just the way it is” when there is massive potential for you to make it whatever you want it to be…

I’ve honestly re-written this post 8 times and each time I read it back and think, ‘you sound insane Kate, how does any of this relate to someone reading who wants to be awesome, and fit, and happy, and healthy?’ Be forewarned – if you’re totally not down with the concepts of beliefs, energy & Universal Intelligence, and often find yourself in the “its all in your genes” camp when discussing health or personality traits, you may want to just close your browser page now. But, if you’re at least marginally open to those concepts, and are curious as to how health, fitness & performance relate to whatever the hell I’m about to dive into, I’d ask you to stick around & see if you can take something out of this that maybe you’d never thought of before.

Ok, time to get weird. So in 2009, when I first began this blog, I was reading & writing about stuff that fascinated me – specifically, the potential in having certain genes in your genetic code, but not ending up like how the other people in your family with similar genes did. You see, my dad died of heart disease & a stroke when I was 17. His parents died of similar stuff when HE was a young man. And, my moms’ side had a history of developing diabetes and/or heart disease, as well as living with obesity. Seems like I had my destiny spelled out for me.

From college-age on, I was open to the ‘woo-woo’ stuff that many people write off – Wayne Dyer/Power of Intention & Gary de Rodriguez/Neuro-Linguistic Programming sort of stuff. Along the path, I stumbled on Bruce Lipton, a stem cell biologist, who used his mastery of cell biology & quantum physics theories to radically change the way we look at ‘belief’ ‘energy’ ‘inter-connectedness’ and the ‘power of thought.’ So I wrote a post about it with the small understanding of it that I had, and since that post left my fingertips, I relegated it to the back of my mind, remembering it, but not doing much more with it. I just didn’t know where to go next and how to learn more. A lot happened along the way to today, but no matter what, that post always sort of stuck out in the back of my mind. Recently, I was listening to a podcast & they mentioned reading Bruce Lipton’s Biology of Belief and I thought, “hm, I wrote about him a few years ago, that’s enough procrastinating, I really need to go back and dive into his work.”

So I did, and when I explained his concepts back then, I was sheltered in my understanding enough so that, at the time, it was just like “hey, check out this neat concept! cool, our genes don’t determine our destiny and positive thinking can be helpful, yay!” God bless naïveté. It takes just enough wool off your eyes to let you appreciate things without showing you the whole show, which if you saw the whole show, would make you freak out and lose the footing you have because you realize the footing you’re on isn’t just a footing, it’s a massive plane that bleeds into everything, including you, so that now you see things are actually sort-of seamless and inter-connected in a way that’s sort of screwed up to think about in a a+b=c type thought process. Like I said, God bless naïveté.

So to start off my series on ‘Transformation Potential’, I’m going to let the naive Kate who wrote about these concepts a few years back take over & get us going on the path. Here’s how I explained quantum physics, cell biology & YOU in Sept of 2009:

There is an energy field in the environment that surrounds the cells & it is that which helps them do their job & has now shown to have control in the resultant actions of the DNA. (Older, wiser(?) Kate here: this I CAN explain better now…if you look at 1 single cell, all its’ functions are not operating via the nucleus (the place where the DNA is housed) which is what scientists long believed (it’s not true). Instead, the cell functions via receptor (receiving) and effector (doing) proteins that read signals that the cell membrane, the fluid-y stuff that surrounds the cell, send out based on changes in the environment that the cell membrane is picking up on. In fact, you can remove a cell nucleus, formerly thought to be ‘the brain’ of the cell, and the cell will go on living and doing all its functions. Why? Because the cell membrane is reading and responding to the environment, not the nucleus. Translation for us? Just because you have certain DNA does not mean it will be expressed. Have a cancer gene? No guarantee it will express itself as cancer, the environment must be right for that piece of DNA to get turned on and go to work.)

Furthermore, Dr. Lipton’s research found that your perceptions and beliefs have the ability to eclipse your genetic make-up that you think you have inherited. Think about that – it means that the way you think about yourself and life dictates how your body will respond all the way down to the cellular level. Now it is a little more complex than just thinking positively to ensure you get a positive end-result of whatever you’re going for – but the reality is, that saying that “life is 5% what happens to you, and 95% how you respond to it” is TOTALLY FREAKING TRUE. (Older Kate here again: I’m not talking like in a “just hang in there kitty” motivational poster kind of way. I (and Bruce) mean that literally, your cells are reading your environment, and based on the vibrational-energy that they’re picking up from the energy level that your thoughts, perceptions, and feelings are running on, is how they will respond and express their gene potential. Check this: Clifton Meader, a Nashville physician, had a patient in 1974 with esophageal cancer, a condition that was 100% fatal in that time. He was treated but everyone knew he’d die from the cancer, and it was no surprise when he did, in fact, die a few weeks after diagnosis. But- they autopsied his body, and while they did find some cancer, the amount found a) was NOT on his esophagus and b)was nowhere near enough to be considered lethal. So what killed him? Was it the removal of hope (“this is a fatal disease”) that all of his doctors told him that set him up to die an early death? They know the cancer didn’t kill him. So what did?? This suggests that people in authority (physicians, teachers, parents) can remove hope by programming you to think you are powerless to the world around you…and it could very well be enough to kill you.)

You can probably remember a time in your life that you thought to yourself, well, ‘this is just how I am’ or ‘this is just the way it is because this is how it is for people in my family.’ This is an untrue statement, unless you let yourself allow it to be true for you. That is, it’s up to YOU to decide how physically fit, how successful, how educated you want yourself to become- and you’re NOT limited by what everyone else in your family has done or not done or what genes you think you have or don’t have.

Yes, we inherit genes from our parents & grandparents, but the research presented by Dr. Lipton & many quantum physicists is that the genes are not the control switch, YOU are via your thoughts, perceptions & beliefs. There are no victims of circumstance when it comes to your physical fitness/level of success/highest desired level of education/etc., and how it plays out through your life. This research shows that you are not on the receiving end of what happens in your life, you are on the creating end. YOU are the creator of your own circumstances, whatever they may be!

Older Kate back 1 more time: see how happy-go-lucky naive I was?? Hopefully this first post on ‘Transformational Potential’ helps us open the floodgates for the awesome potential of creating the life, health, and performance that we want! I’ll be composing more of my thoughts on Dr. Lipton’s stuff & am interested to hear your take on the concept of perception, gene expression, or the power of belief.

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So at least offer something interesting for your “10AM I need a break from work reading material”, here are some things I’ve been living lately:

I have never been more excited for what’s happening with athletes at ProKine! We have a whole new batch of endurance athletes getting their kinetic chain linked up through our strength & conditioning coaching, and they’re feeling and seeing almost-immediate effects in their body and performance level. We (Drew and I) have always stayed committed to our brand of fitness/performance coaching, taking the best things we’re learning from many experts, and turning them into our own proven-methods for re-activating dormant muscles, improving mind-body connections, and helping athletes translate mobility and strength into performance.

We’re at the end of the first session of Body Transform at ProKine this week! Our program members will be re-evaluating their health & performance biomarkers this week & they’ve got some BIG results to register! We’ve watched some of these folks go from feeling like lifting 15lbs was “heavy” to lifting 50lbs 12 times with minimal struggle! There have been some awesome weight and inches lost too! And when we get the results Wed and Thurs, I’ll be sure to share them. Next session starts immediately after this one ends…Mon/Tues May 14/15!

I’ve been reading some interesting stuff on chronic stress…did you ever think about how frequently checking your email or facebook affects your health? This is a good article on how to simplify your work day. I’m implementing several of these strategies into my day. How bout you? I’ve also been studying how stressing about your food choices affects your cortisol levels…the truth…it acts like a chronic stress on your body, keeping HR and cortisol slightly elevated all day long. This can be worse for some than others…if you have obsessive tendencies and/or seriously long history of negative-self-judgement, you are more likely to worry/stress too much about each food choice. This does not mean you should say “screw it” and eat whatever you like. There has to be some detective work on your part, perhaps journaling about the way you relate to food, and also some trust on your part that you can eat something not-quite-as-healthy and know that you’re still doing many other things to maintain your health that this 1 little thing doesn’t matter as much as you may think it does. But in order for that to work, you have to be doing the part where you “do many other things to maintain your health”…regular exercise that is not too hard or too easy…as clean of eating as you can…sleeping 7-9 hours each night sleeping…drinking lots of water & not drinking lots of caffeine/booze/pop…having a positive social circle…etc.

Laughter is good for you. I still laugh at this website, Food on My Dog, and have found this one equally enjoyable, Texts from Dog (NOT safe for young eyes or anyone who avoids foul language)

Here’s a few awesome food sites that give you super-easy recipes! We subscribe to a low-inflammatory diet, also known as ‘paleo’, & recommend any client we’re working with who wants to truly improve their health, body composition, or athletic performance check out the way of eating as it has done everything from help Olympic athletes, like Amanda Beard, perform their best to put auto-immune conditions like RA and PCOS into remission.

• Fast Paleo
• Nom Nom Paleo
• Health Bent

That’s all I’ve got for now. Hope this helped you enjoy your work/lift/stress-break! More to come once I comprehend the material I’m reading right now

I used to think I’d never survive without eating steel cut oatmeal or eggs for breakfast. Now, after learning about how inflammatory grains are to our bodies, and how they create leaky gut syndrome via compounds within them…and after discovering via an elimination test that eggs are a problem for me…I eat breakfast 7 days a week that aren’t eggs or oatmeal. And for all you little cheaters who try to count “eggs” or “oatmeal” as your lunch/dinner…you’re cheating and you know it and you can do better. (Ok, maybe you aren’t a conscious cheater, but you are indeed cheating – you’re cheating yourself out of valuable nutrients, amino acids, and fats that proteins OTHER than eggs (oatmeal isn’t a protein-based meal, stop trying to say that it is) provide.

Here’s a list of things I eat instead of eggs or oatmeal, maybe one will be new for you? Maybe you have 1 to share? Would love to hear it in the comments section! (And, there’s no dairy in any of these, and that includes protein shakes…I’ve just not liked the quality I’ve had lately and they don’t fuel me as well as the stuff below does.)

PS: I don’t “hate” eggs now. I still LOVE them, but eating them regularly is a no-go for me. So once in a blue moon, I may have scrambled eggs, or eggs-over-medium if made by the worlds’ greatest egg chef…but generally? I’d rather eat healthy foods that work for me & that make me feel good, rather than continue eating eggs that clearly are impacting my health & body composition. And it seems to be only a big whack of eggs, like when they are the center of my meal because I have no adverse effects when eating a bit of mayo on my tuna.

*Bacon, kale, avocado salad

*Reheated(leftover) ground beef with a sprinkle of cinnamon & balsamic vinegar + sautéed kale

*Reheated(leftover) ground beef + roasted green beans

*Asian white fish stir fry from Everyday Paleo

*Tuna salad + 1/2 pint cherry tomatoes or a pepper cut into sticks

*Frozen chicken sausages + a big pile of leftover roasted broccoli

*Reheated(leftover) shredded chicken + 1 sweet potato nuked with ghee OR cubed & roasted

*Smoked salmon + roasted asparagus

*Prosciutto (or ham if that’s what I’ve got) wrapped asparagus, roasted in the oven, dipped in dijon mustard

*When eating out: bacon and/or sausage if it’s a decent quality + a request for sautéed veggies, whatever they put into an omelette, just without the omelette

*When unable to sit down to eat: high quality beef jerky + toasted coconut flakes

*Nothing – sometimes, it works out better for me to drink bulletproof coffee & fast until lunchtime when I sit down to a large meal of meat, fat, and vegetables. When I was sugar-adapated, this would never have worked. I’d have been a hangry mess by 9:30. Now? I easily go 6+ hours without eating because I’ve up-regulated my fat-adapted genes.

So there is 12 things you can make (have someone else make…or don’t make at all) for breakfast that are not made of EGGS, DAIRY, PROTEIN SHAKES, JUICES, DRIVE-THRU, or STARBUCKS. Now go find some new things to eat for brekkie! Got a good one that I missed? Add it in the comments and let’s get some new meal ideas going!

Remember being ga-ga for some boy or girl in your youth who you’d literally go to the ends of the Earth for…in a kind of unhealthy, young & stupid/sweet kind of way? Surely most of us have had that relationship that made us lose our damn minds for the person in those initial ‘shiny new thing’ moments of the connection…the relationship that possibly even convinced you some momentous tribute of affection, such as the one below, was a good idea. (Youth of the 80′s…here’s your rom-com John Cusack moment…enjoy)

Click image to go back to the late 80s & watch the movie clip.

In those relationships, there’s little logic, lots of lust (or if you were just 12 at the time, lots of whatever 12-year-olds do instead of lust…plugging my ears as you parents shout out exactly what 12-year-old are doing these days…I’d rather pretend not to know) & a whole lotta short-term-reactionary thinking going on.

Example: girl’s crush, Johnnie, doesn’t work…he takes a ‘damn the man’ stance on work – but he’s cute – so what else do you need, right? Little does girl realize that long-term, Johnnie’s ‘damn the man’ attitude equates to her being the responsible one in the duo & thus taking on everything while Johnnie is a couch-riding POS. Super cute today…not so cute in a few years..but in those youthful, sweet/stupid relationships, you don’t think long-term. Nor do you think with much besides your primal connection to that person.

Lust. Lack of logic. Reactionary thinking (read: ‘I see it, I want it, no matter what’). Compare that to how you relate to food; do you feel like you “need” to get the gooey, sweet, yummy food you see advertised on tv on your next grocery trip? Do you eat dessert even though you clearly are full already? Do your rough days & crappy food days often go hand-in-hand? Those are just 3 examples of lust, lacking logic, & reactionary choices related to food. All that for an object that gives you no love, no affection, not even a mix tape.

I believe these are instrumental pieces within the failure (or ‘never even starting of’) healthy habits. Foods made of bad fats, sugar, & salt are addicting. We know this as a fact, although you have likely already known it on some anecdotal self-awareness level. And yet, like cigarettes, some (many!) continue to do that which we know is harmful.

Why? Because that youthful, John Cusack-style, expression of love that you’re giving to yourself via chips & salsa or Moosetracks ice cream feels really good in the moment, hits a nerve of immediate satisfaction, but makes zero sense in the intelligent, logical part of your brain (ya know, the part you’re ignoring as your spoon dives into the pint of ice cream for the 20th time tonight). We’re emotionally responding to something that, while certainly allowed to be tasty & special, is truly meant to meet a completely UNemotional need. Food is life-giving, it is not lust-giving. Just like our little unemployed young-lust-interest, Johnnie, who lights your fire today but burns your heart tomorrow – handling food & emotion together starts off what seems to be wonderfully, but usually ends terribly (if not today with a tummy ache, certainly down the road with fat gains and/or life-shortening disease).

We tend to become emotionally tied to foods that are not healthy, the ones that are some combo of fat, sugar, and salt. Never has someone lusted themselves into a 1,000 calories of broccoli. I mean, I love broccoli, but it’s physically impossible to eat 1,000 calories of it in 1 sitting like we are certainly capable of doing with candy or chips. I believe, at some level, we realize what a poor choice we’re making when we give in to food cravings that don’t match our health & wellness goals, or when we keep moving along the chip-dip-mouth turnpike.

But why do we keep doing it?

Because we already reacted [reactionary thinking] to some trigger (be it a commercial that brings a craving that you’d kept out of sight to the real estate right in front of your eyes, or the bad day you had that seems logically taken care of in a bag of Doritos). Which led to the lust of the food choice…something that, in a different moment, you may have actually held strong in avoiding but right now, in just the right moment, you give in to that bad-boy choice of ice cream. And then, the completely logic-lacking thought process of short-term emotional satisfaction we try to get from the food (we knew 5 minutes ago about our goals, and we still know about them as we eat the wrong foods, but we stuff that ‘logical goal stuff’ down deep enough for long enough to go ahead with the bad food choice).

If you can use those smart, find-a-good-man/woman-with-a-job-skills your mother would be proud of as you approach the next craving moment you have with food, I think you can improve the choices you make, and become stronger in your ability to stay on course with your health & wellness goals as they relate to food.

To further kill the lust of food cravings – consider that cold-turkey is really the fastest way to make it happen. People who eat a bit of sugar, a bit of inflammatory foods, on a regular basis are keeping themselves constantly in the cycle. You won’t die if you don’t eat sugar for 30 days…and if you feel like you might, consider that for a minute. You should be connected to no thing so tightly that you feel as though you’ll die if you don’t have it.

To keep logic in the foreground of your food choices, if a craving hits, consider actually writing down a list of the things you’re trying to achieve and read it to yourself as you wait for the craving to pass. Or, make another choice. Your body may actually need nutrients, which you’re registering as “candy!”, so consider having a small meal or snack made up of protein, fat & some veggies.

And finally, to avoid reactionary thinking with food, you’ve got to remove ‘safety’, ‘comfort’, ‘happiness’, and other emotions from how food makes you feel. Food energizes you. Food keeps you alive. Food can give you mental clarity. Food can keep you from being cranky. It does not create safety, comfort, or happiness. Get real with that and you’ll get real with making food choices that give you short & long-term results you are happy with.

The other client is on the other side of this whole ‘paleo’ thing. It’s new to her – this anti-inflammatory/paleo/evolutionary nutrition way of eating. And within 1 week, she’s already convinced that this isn’t possible to sustain for a lifetime. I simply asked that she give it a shot for 45 days, and if she doesn’t like how she looks, feels, and performs after 45 days, she can go back to whatever she wants.

What struck me about both of these situations was the belief that to ‘get healthy’, you must ‘diet’ until you reach your goal weight/size/figure. And that if you ARE following a way of eating that is free of processed foods, sugars, and inflammatory things, you must be doing it to ‘get somewhere’, and that once you’re there, that’s it, you can lay-off, pull-back, or stop-altogether what you’ve done to get there.

Gang, the things that are “good for you”, you have to keep doing in order to sustain long-lasting health & fitness. You brush your teeth daily if you want them to look pearly-white & not fall out. You need to exercise regularly, you can’t just go do a week of exercise and then be set for life. You can’t drink a gallon of water today and be hydrated for the next 10 days. You can’t even take your drivers’ license test once and be done forever. They haul you back in every few years to make sure you can still see, and that you remember what a turn signal is.

Do a little, get a little.

The way you eat is.no.different. If you’re far from your goal, you need to put a lot of effort in to start making headway. A little effort gets you ‘a little’ results. Other fitness pro colleagues agree, the clients we have that fully apply themselves to the shift in eating and exercise do well. The people who half-way do it are the ones who think the way of eating and exercising doesn’t work for them. It works for tens of thousands of people, has proven science behind it, but they’re a unique snowflake and it doesn’t work for them; when the truth *may* be that the grains they continue to allow in their diet, the yogurt they eat every day because they just love it, and the excessive fruit they eat because “at least its better than cookies!” is what’s keeping them from their truly optimal, best-ever health.

Something we see often in the fitness business, clients who say, “I had a few rolls at dinner, that’s not so bad, & its better than I would have done in the past!” This is almost as bad as saying “at least!”…”at least I didn’t eat the WHOLE basket of rolls!”, “at least I’m cutting dessert out 3 nights a week!” Totally. Sure. Fine. Whatever helps you sleep at night. I’m sorry gang, ‘at least’ is as bad as ‘all things in moderation’…it’s horse manure that you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about the choices you’re making for yourself. Own your actions and say instead, “I’m still having dessert. I’m down to 3 times/week but I know that’s limiting my success. I have to decide which I want more – the pleasure of dessert now or the pleasure of achieving these goals I say that I want.” I’m just asking you to own the story you’re telling yourself & stop victimizing yourself through it.

If you think that’s harsh, try this example on for size…what if your kid said, “Mom, I got a D-…but hey, at least it wasn’t an F!” The “at least” is validating their below-effort performance. A better, more ownership-oriented approach that many moms and dads would say is “Hun, you got a D-…I’m relieved you didn’t fail, but I’m not happy with the D- and you shouldn’t be either. That’s a reflection on what you did or did not do in the  class. If you want to earn a better grade, you’re going to have to change some things.”

But back to where I was originally going with this…instead of deciding to ‘do a diet’ in order  to ‘get in shape’, how about trying on a thought process that says, ‘this is how I’m going to be eating for the rest of my life’ & ‘exercising regularly and with some intensity is a part of who I am, now & forever, until death parts us.’

Doing the work to get to a goal is not jail.

You’re not sitting locked behind the bars of a restricted way of life, and you aren’t trying to earn time in the yard for good behavior. Believe it not, maintaining your weight can be an effortless & easy thing to do. It’s one of the avenues you get to express yourself in this life. It’s a choice you get to make all on your own. It’s a way that you get to “own” your life – no one can take that from you & nobody ‘did’ that to you.

I’m not saying getting there won’t be challenging, but it may be that way only because you’re trying on something new, altering your direction from the patterns you’ve followed before, and THAT can be uncomfortable. But do you remember first learning to drive a car? That was uncomfortable! I’ll never forget, at 16, learning to drive stick in our 78 white VW Beetle convertible, rolling backwards down the hill at the stop sign because I couldn’t get comfortable with my clutch. Having to wave the cop around us so that I wouldn’t roll back into him. And now? I don’t even think about when to change gears in a car. I know it, it’s intuitive. You likely drive with one hand while dialing your phone (eyes on the road!) & don’t even think about what you’re doing to navigate the car down the road. You didn’t get there without practice, without going through the learning process.

Everything that is new is uncomfortable. And especially with eating, where we tie up so many emotions, addictions, and social cues around food, it sure can be uncomfortable to head down that path. But if you aren’t willing to be open to the possibility that you actually *can* eat this way for the rest of your life, and that it could actually become easy to you – you’ll never give yourself the chance to be successful. If you can’t allow the possibility that exercise several times per week *is* do-able for you, you’ll succeed only in setting up the road blocks that will eventually trip you up and aid in your failure in reaching your goals.

We could go deep down this rabbit hole in discussion about how intentionally/unknowingly setting up those road blocks is actually your way of keeping yourself safe and keeping yourself stuck in they story you’ve created for yourself, but we don’t have enough blog space to consider all that today. But give it a thought – are you intentionally/unknowingly setting up road blocks at the front end of the path to your goals so that, it gives you an ‘out’ if you don’t succeed? For more on this very real rabbit hole, head over to Oprah’s LifeClass with Tony Robbins – I don’t care if you think its silly, if you’re open to self-growth, you’ll get something out of Tony & Oprah’s stuff.

If you’re ‘dieting’, you’re doing it wrong.

Guys, check it: all paleo is, is a way of eating that reduces or eliminate the stuff that we KNOW has inflammatory properties to it, that we KNOW puts micro-tears in your gut leading to autoimmune manifestations almost anywhere in your body & that asks you to eat more of the things that support your muscles, brain, and every other system in your body. It’s asking you to eat more vegetables & fruits so that you get more vitamins in your body from natural sources. It’s asking you to move toward cleaner food sources – organic, grass-fed, pastured) so that your little body doesn’t have to deal with a mega-toxin load every time you eat. That’s it.

The sad thing is that this is considered ‘weird’ ‘not do-able’ and ‘difficult’ in many circles. If this is a “diet”, it’s one of the simplest diets out there. There’s no counting anything. No frozen food meal plans you have to join. It reconnects you to your body’s actual signals to you – & not the conditioned, emotion-driven, addiction-driven ones we currently operate with. It actually tastes really good. And it’s really versatile to many different lifestyles, flavor profiles, and situations.

My client who’s been doing this for a year and could rattle off more positives from doing this than she has fingers, doesn’t consider it a “diet”. She looks at the foods she eats as something that helps her be healthier for the rest of her life, that helps her reach and maintain whatever fitness goals she’s got, and something that is really not too difficult to do. And it’s my hope that my other client, who’s new to this whole thing, gives it a solid go for long enough to start seeing that I wasn’t lying when I told her she may just look, feel, and perform better eating this way.

Americans (and many others around this obesity-driven world) are looking at it all wrong. It needs to be normal for you to eat vegetables at most of your meals. It needs to be normal to do things that keep your inflammation levels low. It needs to be a normal occurrence to go out and move your body in  a way that elicits strength, fitness, and cardiovascular health. And to get this ‘new normal’ it has to start with you.

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I attended an online summit recently centered around all things paleo & anti-inflammatory. It was nothing short of incredible – with many of the top industry leaders giving presentations on the latest evolutionary nutrition news, and doing so for free, it was like college but so much more awesome. I took notes on the gluten intolerance lecture that gluten intolerance expert, Dr. Tom O’Bryan gave so that I could share the latest info on gluten intolerance with you.

As many long-time readers know, I was diagnosed with non-Celiac gluten intolerance in May of 2009. That means that I’m not in the end-stages of gluten intolerance – Celiac Disease – which is the very last stage of devastation caused by continued ingestion of gluten when intolerant. (Full-blown Celiac Disease is diagnosed by a flattening of the finger-like surfaces within the gut, this occurs after someone has been eating gluten for long enough to wear down their gut lining, making absorption of nutrients extremely difficult from that point forward.)

Just because I do not have Celiac Disease does not mean my gluten intolerance is any less severe – I just caught my intolerance early enough to stop the breakdown of my gut before it got to that point. I cannot stress this enough: if you are diagnosed with gluten intolerance, there is NO more severe/less severe diagnosis – the only concern is how soon was it caught & what symptoms are associated with that stage of health breakdown due to gluten. And as you’ll discover in Dr. O’Bryans’ talk, just because you had some test done for gluten and it came back as ‘not a problem for you’ doesn’t tell the entire story!

As a reminder to folks diagnosed with any level of gluten intolerance: THERE IS NO SAFE EFFECTIVE DOSE OF GLUTEN for someone intolerant to it. Consuming gluten when you know you have a sensitivity to it equates to speeding up the day you’ll meet your Maker. Gluten intolerant individuals die 20% earlier, mostly from cancer and heart disease, than any other person when they continue consuming gluten post-diagnosis. Why, oh why, would you do that to yourself?! Lest we digress into a full-blown discussion on the “why’s” behind people’s food and life choices, let’s get on with the notes that I took from Dr. Tom O’Bryan, leader in gluten intolerance, Celiac Disease, and the care for individuals with gluten intolerance.

Gluten & Gluten Intolerance:
Going Mainstream (or was it always here & just getting overlooked)

Presentation by Dr. Tom O’Bryan

“Let’s be clear about how gluten intolerance can manifest….it can manifest as Celiac Disease (in the gut), as myocarditis (in the heart), as autism or ADD (in the brain), as PCOS or infertility (in the reproductive organs)…gluten sensitivity can manifest anywhere that the immune reaction occurs. You see, gluten is a gnarly protein that loosens up the gut lining so it can slip through, taking other food particles with it to various places in the body. The immune system catches that & says, “woah, send immune responders over to the brain/ovaries/joints/pancreas/any place the food and gluten end up”, and the immune carries out its response on the cells in that area – including the cells of that organ or tissue. As those cells get broken down, strange things happen to that organ or tissue – it develops problems like ADD or autism, it stops working correctly thereby creating pain, dysfunction & disease in that area of the body. Gluten sensitivity is on a spectrum – you can be majorly reactive to it, or very minor-ly reactive to it. But make no mistake, everyone reacts to gluten. “

“Let’s back up a minute…there is something about calling it “gluten intolerance” or “gluten sensitivity” that makes it sound ‘less bad.’ In fact, people will say, ‘do you have a gluten allergy’ and it’s often easiest to say “yes!” even though that is actually not true. You see, when the skin-prick allergy testing first began, this was the very first method used for testing if someone had an immune-response to foods, environmental things, or chemicals. And so if you got a positive response from that skin-prick test, you were told you had an ‘ALLERGY’ to it. Even though, the skin-prick test is only testing for 1 FORM of immune-response…

Let’s back up again…think of your immune response as the Armed Forces. You’ve got the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and so on. In your body, you also have several divisions of armed force immune responders – they are called IgE, IgA, IgG, and so on – there are actually 5 types of immune response, and only ONE is measured by doing a skin-prick. Similarly, only  ONE type is measured when you do a blood-allergy test (thus why those tests are only 30% effective)……

So we’ve got these skin-prick immune responses as the 1st kind ever tested for & so the flag was struck in the ground naming those as “allergies.” It’s kind of like “Kleenex” ‘will you get me a Kleenex,’ we all know that it may not be an actual Kleenex-brand tissue that we are requesting, in fact, we’re just requesting a tissue, but it’s so tied into our lexicon, that getting everybody to change and call it by its’ correct name, ‘a tissue’ instead of saying ‘Kleenex’ and everyone knowing what you mean – it’s just not going to happen. Well, the same is true for “allergy”. Many scientific papers were written using the term ‘allergy’ & then later on, we discovered we could test for these other immune responders, the other divisions of the armed forces within us, and it was just too late to go back & change the lexicon, so discovering an immune-response that uses other divisions of the armed forces in our body had to be called something else, and so we got “intolerance” and “sensitivity”. They are no less worse than “allergy” but they simply must be called something different.”

“A food sensitivity is when you have an immune response to that food. A food intolerance is when you don’t have enough of that enzyme to break down that food i.e. ‘lactose intolerance.’ Far more people have food sensitivities than realize it. This is not a rare problem, and it is not exclusive to gluten, although that is one of the worst immune-producing responders out there.’

“Autoimmune disease is the #1 cause of morbidity(meaning; you die)/mortality(meaning: you get sick & it leads to death) in the industrial world. We thought it was heart disease for a long time, but we are now seeing a strong auto-immune connection in the progression of heart disease. Heart disease, remember, begins with inflammation in the heart walls.”

“Almost all of us have an autoimmune condition within us already, it’s just not bad enough to make us sick yet. No one gets Alzheimers’ in their 70s. It begins in their 30′s and 40′s & progresses….

There are 3 components to developing an autoimmune condition into something that produces major symptoms:
1) genetic variability – do you have the genes for it AND did you up-regulate those nasty genes by your lifestyle choices
2) environmental trigger – gluten is the most common trigger that leads to #3
3) intestinal permeability – we find in patients with end-stage autoimmune conditions, many have long-standing leaky gut syndrome”

“Every bit of food is either inflammatory or anti-inflammatory.”

“If gluten gets through your gut, your immune response goes after it. It becomes trained to fire bullets at the gluten wherever it finds it (blood vessels, thyroid, brain, etc.). Regularly consuming gluten brings a regular onslaught of bullets at the gluten floating around your body. You have then successfully developed your autoimmune condition.”

“In the Annals of Internal Medicine Journal in 2006, there was such a strong correlation found of osteoporosis patients that were ALSO carrying a gluten sensitivity that the researchers of the study confidently wrote in the Journal that ALL osteoporosis/osteopenia patients SHOULD be checked for Celiac/gluten sensitivity….when you ingest gluten, it binds to the minerals in your diet, and since your body needs those minerals to function correctly, in an effort to save itself, it leaches the minerals from your bones, thereby creating weak & brittle bones – osteoporosis. Interestingly, the greater the degree of osteoporosis, the greater the degree of improvement on a gluten-free diet!”

“Another very common symptom of patients with a gluten sensitivity is terrible muscle pain, aches, and weaknesses. The reason? Sometimes, when the body makes antibodies to gluten to fight it off, it also makes antibodies to actin, myosin & endomysium. Every muscle in your body is made of actin, myosin & is covered by a sheath of endomysium. Now you have created a system where the immune response thinks it should be attacking the very things that make-up your muscles! This not only can make a person sore, but it can make them feel overly fatigued because their muscles are being torn down continuously.”

“Fatigue is the #1 symptom of people with allergies/sensitivities.”

“Athletes on a non-inflammatory diet consistently improve their performance.”

“The gut biopsy is no longer the gold-standard for testing for a gluten sensitivity. Other tests are catching Celiac and gluten sensitivity much earlier. If you have damage in your intestines, it’s already gotten bad. You want to catch an immune response to gluten early – before your gut is permanently damaged.”

CYREX LABS {cyrexlabs (dot) com} offers the best early testing.

“There are 2 steps to addressing gluten sensitivity: 1) stop throwing gas on the fire. You must eliminate gluten from your diet. Entirely & forever. 2) Heal the damage caused to your body (rebuild the brain cells that have been damaged, heal the gut wall that has been torn apart, fix the adrenals from all the stress your body has dealt with from constantly fighting the foods you’re eating)…

Many people eliminate gluten and begin to feel better. But many miss the 2nd step – you’re going to need to supplement with natural vitamins, minerals, and possibly herbs & nutrients in order to repair the damage. This is where a well-qualified naturopath or integrative physician/functional medicine doc can help you. Unfortunately, conventional doctors are not well-trained in this arena, and are often of little help in diagnosing or recovering from this. It can take 1-2 years of work on this issue to begin to fully heal the body. But don’t give up, your life will get better & better as you look, feel, and perform better & better!”

And the Doc’s final words of the presentation, which I love:
“Just think rationally & ask the question: Are there things that could be keeping me from truly being optimally healthy?”

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I hate how downer this post starts out, but every time I tried to change it, it just didn’t sound as true as it needed to be. So, sorry bout that – but stay with me & we’ll end this thing on the usual-motivational-full-of-promise-happytude that I usually deliver!

“Staring in the mirror – not seeing what you want to see…not seeing what the magazine/video/Biggest Loser recommended exercise circuit says you’ll see if you follow their program…feeling frustration/anger/discontent/apathy rise up & then either responding to that emotionally (by eating or skipping a workout or doing some other ‘thing’ that takes you away from your optimal self) or responding with no-response, just a lie that ‘it’s not that bad’, ‘you’re doing the best you can’, blahblahblah.”

Sound familiar? It sure does to me! And not because I see and hear about this with my own clients when they first show up to meet me (although those are common things I hear from new clients)- but actually, that paragraph up there sounds familiar to me because I was all of those statements at one point or another as recently as 5 years ago. Oh, and lest I forget – since becoming the person I am now from the person in those statements, I lost 20lbs.

So yep, I actually can relate when someone is staring down a grocery store aisle and feeling like they’re paralyzed by indecision. I can relate to the cravings & mood swings that seemed to surround certain types of foods. I “get it” when you know you’re bigger than you should be/want to be/strive to be. I understand exercising and seeming to not get anywhere on the scale or in the mirror with it.

I speak from experience when I tell you, it’s actually not supposed to be so hard to get to the optimal health & fitness, but there is so much garbage out there luring your “help me lose weight & get healthy” dollars (see example A of this garbage here) that even someone with a degree in this stuff {ME} was screwing it up when I first began my career!

Let’s be honest…looking good is a part of the result we hope for in practicing healthy habits. But running neck-&-neck with looking good will absolutely be *feeling good *feeling confident *performing well *not having guilt for yourself & your bad habits hanging over your head *avoiding disease…essentially, feeling your best, most totally optimal self.

It’s not just about looking good…your health is never stagnant, you’re either getting healthier & sustaining that, or getting sicker & speeding up the trip towards disease/death.

When I was in worse shape, you could tell I had muscles and worked out, but I didn’t look as fit & healthy as I should have. Things like excess body fat, the quality of your skin/nails/hair/under-eye area, your digestion, your energy level, your achy-ness or muscle soreness – they are just some of the areas that are indicative of how healthy & fit you are. And I had trouble in every one of those areas (and likely more that I’m just not remembering anymore).

But because looking & feeling the way I did was simply unacceptable to me, I started researching & learning what else could work since what I was reading in my textbooks wasn’t working. I began to change the way I ate. I started changing how I exercised. I started thinking outside of the standard as-seen-on-tv-and-commercials food & exercise boxes. And my fitness, health, and body shape started changing with it. I started to see that it WAS possible for me to improve my health, my body, and my fitness – despite not “having the genes” for it. You see, heart disease & obesity ran in my family – and in the old days, we thought that was the guaranteed future for you then. Now, through my studies, I know that actually has very little bearing on your potential long-term health & fitness.

I started voraciously studying evolutionary biology, nutrition, and movement. And I started to see that the ‘normal’ way of doing things in a gym and in your kitchen was just not right. I started to understand that ‘normal’ foods are highly inflammatory to many folks & that the way most folks workout is also highly inflammatory to the hormonal balance in our bodies. And since disease is rooted in inflammation (so is body fat), and hormone imbalance equates to imbalances all throughout the body, it stood to reason that my fitness, health & body shape would benefit from managing my inflammation and hormone/chemical messengers within my body.

 I tested what was going on inside my body, I saw what was going on outside, & I applied the principles of health that were new to me to see if they’d have an impact on my health & fitness. Lo and behold – I got thinner, leaner, and healthier than I’d ever been in my life. And it’s not a struggle to maintain. The fact that I don’t spend hours in a gym, I don’t write down everything I eat anymore, I don’t emotionally attach myself to what I eat or don’t eat, & since technically, I should be genetically doomed – it’s all fueled me to get this info to as many people as possible. Because we CAN be a healthier, fitter version of the person we are now. We all can! But most of us aren’t because we’re often not even sure what to try to be healthy & fit because every magazine says something different, and there are tons of people with ZERO nutritional background teaching nutritional foundations (i.e. Kathy Freston of the vegan movement, who’s biggest success is being the wife of an important tv exec).

Weight loss is simply a natural side-effect of reducing inflammation, gaining muscular & cardiovascular strength & improving the quality of nutrients taken in.

It’s true. Our clients do not go on a “weight loss” program with us & I didn’t go on a “weight loss” plan myself either. We simply start optimizing what they eat, how they move, and how they live – and within the 1st month, things start changing. Their pants size changes. They feel different. They look different. They’re sleeping better.

Would you trust a man wearing a puffy vest & swim trunks to help you get fit?

I write about much of what I do for my health here on my blog, but a lot of folks connect with me and have trouble putting it all together. Totally understandable since, ya know, this isn’t your full-time job, & you could literally spend hours reading all kind of different things on the internet before you even get to the hours needed to try them! And there’s tons of misleading stuff out there – so I get why many folks really struggle to be the health level, weight, or clothing size they want to be.

That’s why I’m so stoked about what we’re up to at ProKine these days! We’ve seen these optimal fitness techniques work with many clients & we consistently get positive results. And now, we’re putting it all into one comprehensive group training program designed for someone who wants to be healthier & fitter for the rest of their life!

We’re calling it “Body Transform” because you will absolutely transform yourself by the end of the program. Most people think of ‘body transformation’ and think of their physical shape – which will change to the tune of 6-20lbs in 6 weeks in the program – but don’t discount the changes in internal health that are possible when you improve the quality of your exercise, your nutrition & even your mindset. Drew, my partner is crime & co-owner of ProKine, is a specialist when it comes to helping folks transform the power of their mind – I know because he’s helped me tremendously in this area! And I have to give credit where it’s due: I guarantee you that I’d be well on my way to disease if he’d not shown me the entry point to all the things I’ve done in the last 5 years to get healthier & fitter. Seriously, he likely saved me from early cancer or latent heart disease. So I guess you could say he is the founder of our Body Transform Program!

If you or someone you know seriously wants a change in their health & fitness for the better, please share this info with them & get in contact with us here. First class of our new program starts April 2nd. We’ll be guiding  the exercise, nutrition, and at-home exercise work for each participant – same as we’ve successfully done with our fat-loss clients up to this point. So, is it worth it to you to commit 6 weeks of your time if it meant you come out the other side a transformed person?

*There are limited spots so let us know if you want to be the first official class to Transform!

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This blog post came out of a conversation I had with a client who’s learning more about nutrition in order to perform their best. (Frankly, if you’re not doing that to some degree in your life, what are you doing?)

I asked, “what’s going on in your diet for protein?”

You're not a squirrel. Stop eating so many of these.

They replied, “I have my nuts as of right now.”

STOP! Stop right there! Ok, let’s review this – don’t worry – marketing campaigns for food have screwed up everyone’s understanding of everything we put in our mouths, so don’t worry if you don’t see the immediate problem with considering nuts as your protein source.

As this client learned – nuts are primarily a fat. Not a source of protein. To equal the protein in 3oz of meat – which is the standard, albeit teeny-tiny sized portion most RDs look at as a serving size – you’d need to eat 2/3 of a cup of almonds. Picture that in your head? Got it? You may be thinking, “ummm…I routinely eat that amount of nuts, I possibly eat that amount of nuts several times per day….is there a problem with that?” To which I reply – “umm, yes.” Along with the approximate 18g of protein in that 2/3 cup of almonds, you’re also getting 550 calories (I struggle to eat 550 cals in a meal, as most folks would) and you’re getting almost 50g of fat (fat is good for you, but this much fat, mostly from highly inflammatory omega-6′s…is not nutritious).

In case that whole omega-6/omega-3 thing is confusing, here’s the skinny: Omega-3′s do good things for the heart and other parts of the body, when in the body in the right amount…even too much of a good thing is not a good thing. Omega-3′s are found

I stink compared to coconut oil, lard, tallow, ghee, or butter for cooking.

commonly in fish & grass-fed (grass-finished!! not so much in grain-finished) beef. Omega-6′s on the other hand are highly unstable when used in cooking, are usually rancid right off the shelf, & is easily oxidized in the body. Think of when you bite an apple & it turns brown if you just leave it sit there. Oxidation. Not what you want highly unstable, inflammatory things doing in your body. They wreak havoc when found in excess in the body – ahem, heart disease & any other disease that occurs when you have excess inflammation in your body.

The vast majority of us have WAY too many omega-6′s and way too few omega-3′s. Omega 6′s are found in the cooking oils most folks think are healthy – sunflower, safflower, canola, corn, soybean, peanut & cottonseed oils are at the top of the ‘nasty’ list. Omega 6′s are also found in processed foods, most things that come in a box, nuts, and chicken. Did I surprise you with that last one? Surprised me too, although I dislike chicken so I try to eat it as little as possible – keeping my intake of protein to beef, fish, & pork. Assume anything you eat out – even Chipotle which can be a decent place to get a gluten free/paleo/healthy meal otherwise – is cooked in high omega-6 oils.

So what’s your take-away on this side-track about omega-6′s? Eliminate all the ‘easy’ sources and consider eating more fish and/or taking fish oil. Fish oil and fish is a whole other topic to get into, and I’m happy to if the audience is interested. But suffice to say – you may not be able to avoid omega-6′s because you’ve got a work dinner out – but you definitely can avoid them by not eating gobs of nuts, cooking in the oils listed above, or eating grain-fed conventional beef. Oh! I just thought of another thing – farmed fish, like salmon, are increasingly being fed grains which are high in omega-6′s, thereby increasing the omega-6 content of the fish, and thus decreasing the omega-3 content of it. yeah…fish…eating grains…stupid. I don’t know why anyone thinks a fish could/should eat grains. Look at a fish’s fins, when on God’s Green Earth would a fish saddle up to a stalk of wheat waving in a field and start chomping on it?? It wouldn’t. Only in the seriously screwed up world of factory-farming and GMO food would that happen. Don’t eat farmed fish! From what Whole Foods tells me though, tilapia MUST be farmed, something about catching those slippery little buggers out in the ocean being a problem, so make sure when you DO buy tilapia that it comes from a responsible source. If the fish monger (oh, your store doesn’t have a fish monger? well how bout your butcher?…no butcher either? you’re probably not going to get good protein from a place with neither of those. walk away from the meat counter before anyone gets harmed) Well, when you can find a butcher/fish monger, ask them where the fish came from and what it’s back story is.

So what gives? Why does it seem like the big marketing push for nuts is “they have protein! so they are good!” Well, you know those match.com commercials that are of the happy couples who found love on that site and are now buying a house/getting married/in unending bliss? I totally fell for those and thought, ‘wow! online dating seems to really work!’ Until I had dinner with my best friend whose a PR genius in a big agency downtown and she reminded me that “every thing that can be purchased by a consumer needs some spin and PR.” (Maybe online dating really works as well as the commercials show it to, but I’m less certain now that I realize it may just be is PR and marketing in those commercials making me think that….that, and the ever-growing number of stories I’ve laughed at & been horrified by as told by my friends who’ve tried online dating.)

Ok, let’s bring it home! We’ve traveled down quite a few paths since starting with nuts! What’s the moral(s) of the story(ies)??

- Get a background check on your fish like you’re taking it on a date. I bet the people on match.com do it. What goes in your mouth is as/more important than the person you meet online – run your background checks.

- Speaking of online dating…they may all be liars. Just about every company that has a savvy marketing campaign is a liar to some degree. The good food producers won’t be lying to you, necessarily, they’ll just be further glamourizing something that’s already awesome…like the guy online who’s seriously perfect for you but maaaaay just be an inch (or 3) shorter than what he says he is.

- Omega-6′s are in lots of things, including you. Reduce your consumption. Use your industrial seed oils for something they’re actually good for – greasing your door hinges.

- And finally, nuts are not primarily protein. They are primarily fat. And while we like fat, nothing good can come from eating gobs of nuts. How to know you’re eating too many? If you have to question yourself, you may already have a problem.

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You may think this sounds like a ridiculous idea, but I think it sounds like a fun way to use your body & your time – because remember, you get only 1 life and only 1 shot at making memories, what you do each day will create the life you reflect on & the memories you hold when you’re old and gray someday.

So handstands & backbends went into my weekly program. But there is only so much you can do watching videos online. Which is what I did for a few months. As I’m sure many of you trying to learn how to have better run form or proper TRX pushup form do! I got my handstand back. Got cartwheels & flips into the pit at the trampoline park near our house. And then I got stuck. I wasn’t sure how to get better, or where to go next to progress myself. Sound familiar? I think everyone who’s ever tried to improve in some way has come to this point.

I knew I needed coaching if I was going to progress past the basic handstand. But apparently, gymnastics facilities are not too eager to have anyone over age 21 in their gym, even in a private lesson. I would know. I asked….and was denied at several facilities. And then, when I was driving into the warehouse park where ProKine is located, it hit me. The cheerleading school around the corner from us offers private tumbling lessons! No, it wasn’t beam, bar & vault work – but it was a start. Would they take me??

I called, explained what I was looking for and how I was relatively practiced already but needed coaching to move to the next level and would they please give me a shot. They would!! And so this is how I found myself surrounded by screaming little girls as I set down my hoodie & purse (no other tumblers had purses I noted…clearly children don’t need a purse to hold car keys and a wallet…note to self, don’t bring purse next time) & walked over to meet my coach.

I’m in private lessons so it’s just going to be just me & my coach working on skills. Which is so awesome. A private coach can help you because the whole workout is devoted to you & your issues. Whatever you stink at, they’ll laser in on and address immediately. They specialize in a certain field – in this case, tumbling – and they will give you all the little tips & cues needed to “get it” quicker than you’ll ever get it on your own.

It is exactly what Drew & I do in personal training, and it was really cool to be on the other side of the equation, for once!

The first thing I said to Drew when I got out of my lesson was, “it was awesome to get these cues for certain tricks that made an immediate difference in me ‘getting’ the skill! I would NEVER have gotten that from watching videos online!”

And this is why you hire a coach people. To address your limiters. Reach goals you desire greatly. Limit the risk for injury. And cut the time to goal accomplishment that you would have wasted trying to figure it out on your own.

Oh, and 1 more reason: To think big for you…to see a vision you weren’t sure was possible. I went into my lesson with a list of various handstands & front or back walkovers that would be my ‘long range goal.’ Here’s what I tweeted after my lesson tonight…

1st tumbling private lesson 2nite:thought walkovers would b extent of me.coach says handsprings & tucks r in my future. #biggoals #melikey—
Kate Galliett (@kgalliett) February 23, 2012

I *never* would have thought back handsprings or tumbling sequences that included back tucks would be possible for me. Those were the last skills I learned in gymnastics as a child before quitting the sport in favor of the traditional school sports – 16 YEARS AGO. I have no idea if or when I’ll get to those skills, but I am so excited & hopeful for this new endeavor, & am thrilled to be on the receiving end of some private coaching! If you have goals in mind, I’d strongly urge you to consider hiring a coach to help you get there. In business, sports & life – there are coaches available who know their stuff & can guide you to (and beyond!) the end result you have in mind. And if they’re a good coach, & you’re committed to the process, it will be worth more than the time & money you put into it!