Hello everyone and welcome to Day 6, it’s nice to have you join us you again! 🙂

Helen, I totally agree that everyone has to find their own path and make their own choices. More often than not, we don’t always choose the optimal path from the get-go, but we inevitably learn some lessons which lead us closer to our own personal truth. I think there is a fundamental human need to make mistakes, it’s part of the learning process. The trick is to actually take the time to reflect on them and deduce the lesson – never give up, keep on trying! So it’s OK for anyone not to be perfect at this very instant, but if you’re better than you were yesterday, acknowledge and even applaud yourself for it – it’s a sure sign that you’re on the right track. Don’t be afraid to try and to fail. Progress is what matters. There is really no rush to be a certain weight right now. It’s not realistic – or healthy – to try undo a lifetime’s worth of suboptimal choices in a very short period of time!

I don’t think any one approach to health or weight management can apply to every human being. We all have a unique biochemical individuality that can make our personal “ideal” nutrition to be different than the next person’s. Just where our direct ancestors come from could have a big impact on food tolerances and sensitivities! That being said, the human body and its metabolism have evolved on Earth over the last nearly 3 million years, and so I believe the best nutritional framework we have must be based on the study of evolutionary biology. If we plotted all of human history onto a 24 hour clock, the development of agriculture and grain-based diets (around 10,000 years ago) represents only the last 12 seconds!! This is a major reason I think wheat in particular has such insidious effects on our health, in the long-term. Let alone the fact that practically all wheat on the planet is now genetically modified. A good place to learn about this specifically is the book Wheat Belly, by renowned cardiologist Dr. William Davis.

Now, although an evolutionarily novel food does not automatically imply that it’s problematic, if we just look around us, there is abundant proof that we’ve got it seriously wrong!

The current low-fat doctrine – and by extension high-carb/sugar – has so messed with our neuro-regulation of appetite and caused major changes in our gut biome that our bodies are getting progressively more damaged, at an alarming rate. This also results in us being completely out of touch with the distress signals our bodies may be giving us. It’s no wonder that the risk of cancer has gone from 1 in 30 in 1900 to 1 in 2 (and getting worse) as of the year 2000!! This means that at least half of us are going to die of cancer, according to solid statistics. If that doesn’t scare the pants off you enough to initiate change, I don’t know what will.

We have a frightening percentage of metabolically damaged and obese people than has ever before existed anytime in the history of the world. One look at our current Western world and the USDA’s food pyramid/food plate makes it obvious that the Standard American Diet (SAD) is not working! As a population, we are sicker than ever before, and the reason for this has political underpinnings as well (inevitably).

Based on this, I firmly believe that it makes sense to eat something resembling our ancestral diet, which is likely most appropriate for our genetics (mutations and adaptations take millennia!). In any case, I think we can all agree that it is absurd to just accept and blindly trust what any government tells us about what is best for us.

So, in order to end this somewhere, my TIP is for everyone to continue to educate yourselves on what health and optimal nutrition really is. And expect it to change over time – we must keep an open mind! There is so much we don’t know yet, it’s scary. Mankind’s knowledge of nutrition is still in its infancy. The trap is to never think our “modern science” knows best and has finally outsmarted nature. It’s up to each and every one of us to keep learning and do the best we know how, right now.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
–Arthur Schopenhauer (Gernan philosopher)

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
–Albert Einstein

P.S. Nick, I will definitely watch the video you sent and an upcoming tip will be about the potential benefits of intermittent fasting.