Jamie Fellrath | Practical Mindfulness

A Smart Baby! Though I'm a bit behind on my podcasts right now (after a marathon listening routine to catch up with Angelo Coppola's Latest in Paleo podcast), I listened to Robb Wolf's Paleo Solution podcast yesterday and came away from it with a couple of little meat gobbets of info that I found interesting from a Paleo mental healthtype standpoint. Robb had the Healthy Skeptic , Chris Kresser, on as a guest, talking about Kresser's new product called the Healthy Baby Code , which is an instructional series on the best ways to take care of yourself if you want to conceive (mostly for women, though some would most certainly be applicable to men), if you're currently pregnant, and how to take care of your baby once the happy day arrives. The two portions of the podcast that I found most interesting from a standpoint of mental development were at 22:30 and 42:42.  The first was where Chris and Robb were discussing proper macronutrient levels for a pregnant ...

[caption id="attachment_190" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Fight the dark side!"] [/caption] As you know from my previous post about Caffeine and Cortisol , I started a 30-Day Coffee fast last Thursday.  And so far, so good. I've been coffee-free since then and I'm feeling pretty good. I was experiencing some minor withdrawal headaches on Thursday and Friday (slightly worse on Friday), but that was nothing to worry about - I didn't even take aspirin for it on Friday, just gutted it out. I had one slip-up when I had a small iced-tea on Sunday, I'm hoping that that was small enough that the effects were negligible.  I wasn't even thinking about it at that point, though, so the withdrawal problems that some were telling me about were limited to the small headaches. I'll take it. At the beginning of this experiment, I was jut a hair under a 34 waist on my pants.  And my sleep, while okay, wasn't super-great.  So t...

No Caffeine for Me! Today, I began upon a 30-day experiment to reduce my cortisol levels by removing coffee from my diet. The goal is to see how it might be affecting my cognitive function and my belly fat. Cortisol is a hormone that is related to stress .  At a very basic level, cortisol is created as a response to stressors in our environment.  Back when we were still chucking spears at deer and chasing down antelope, cortisol was helping to preserve our lives by giving us quick energy by signalling to our livers that it was time to engage in a process known as gluconeogenesis. This process is basically the breakdown of amino acids, the building blocks of protein, into glucose - one of the two monosaccharides (the healthy one) that our bodies use for fuel. Picture this - you're walking across the street, enjoying the day, when suddenly some inattentive driver tries to turn and doesn't see you.  Your heart rate speeds up, and you get a little burst of speed to quickly sp...

Just a short note for now - I did a guest post over at Tony Federico's LiveCaveman - Fitness in an Evolutionary Direction blog, and I hope you'll all go check it out. Tony does a great job of presenting fitness and nutrition in an accessible way and making it fun! He has great passion for the Paleo lifestyle and I hope everyone will check out more of his fine work, and take advantage of his coaching!

Ever since Rachel of PaleoFreedom announced her success with a Paleo diet in treating her daughter Scarlett's autism , it seems like stories about autism and Paleo are coming out of the woodwork.  But one of the most interesting and coincidental articles came to me from Lisa Jo Rudy, the Autism Guide at About.com . Though Ms. Rudy does not mention the Paleo lifestyle or diet per se in her articles for this particular newsletter, it's interesting to note that the entire newsletter is dedicated to the connection between brain function and proper gut health.  Rudy points out a study from McMaster University where researchers looked at the effects of gut bacteria on the behavior of mice, noting that those with lower levels of probiotic bacteria had both behavior changes and reduced levels of a key behavioral-based marker in the brain (as noted in the Newswise article that Rudy used as a reference): Working with healthy adult mice, the researchers showed that disrupting the norm...

What a great story this is.  RobbWolf.com is carrying a testimonial from Paleo devotee Rachel, whose daughter Scarlet experienced an amazing turnaround in her autism after her mother put her on a Paleo diet to help her overcome that issue.  Rachel also blogs at PaleoFreedom, and shared her story there as well with more detail that will be familiar to parents of autistic children. Scarlet was diagnosed fairly early, at 20 months, and was speaking at only an 8-month old level.  She had lots of stimming type behavior and displayed a number of sensory-triggered apprehensive traits as well. Her mother put her on a Gluten-Free/Casein-Free (GFCF) diet to begin with, and there was a fair amount of improvement there with her vocabulary improving to about five words.  But she was having problems with family members sneaking her cookies and the like, which was undoing or at least interfering with the progress she'd made. Finally, Rachel put Scarlet on a full Paleo diet - grain/dairy/legume f...

There are a lot of great Paleo and low-carb podcasts out there on the Aethernets, and a lot of us get a great deal of our information from them. Let's face it - the mainstream media isn't so great (though getting better) about covering the latest in real science at the level to which we've become accustomed with such great blog and podcast content as we have in our community. But because there's a lot of content to cover, it can't always be addressed as the mainstream media would like to cover it: sound bites and easy-to-swallow portions. Like the meat and veggies we all love so much, Paleo podcasts have to be chewed and swallowed to get all the relevant information across, and that takes some time. If you're strapped for time like I frequently am, and want to catch up on some of the great offerings that our community has to offer, then I'll recommend you listen to Latest in Paleo , by Angelo Coppola. But as you'll find out, that's hardly the only re...