I posted a comment today that I made some time ago on the private subscription blog of Arthur De Vany.  My comment is one of hundreds of comments per month of new, intermediate, experienced EF’ers and medical and fitness professionals, who post on Art’s EF blog.  The comment I posted is an example of some of the feelings I had about 4-5 months into the journey.  It’s a great place to commune, especially for those that are just starting, and nearing a year into it I am learning more every day.  There’s a lot of very distinguished people in the health and medical community that subscribe, and it’s a blast to hear their various points of view.

Over the next few months, in addition to The Paleo Post, which you’ll find on the left column of this site, I’m going to begin to lay out the main sites and/or characters of the subculture of the various interpretations/tribes of evolutionary living.  There’s Paleo, Primal, Evolutionary Fitness (or EF’ers)…  I’ve seen this all described as the paleo diet (a la Cordaine), or a fitness regime, or pathway, or primal lifestyle, etc.  Recently, not sure whether he noticed, but I’ll bet that he did!, Art made reference to this growing movement.  This movement that includes people who seek organic food, free range and/or grassfed meat, localism, gardeners, and those that seek to train and eat based on an evolutionary model for sure includes a very diverse group.  Well, Art called this movement “evolutionary living”, I like that.

I think it’s a great uniting phrase.  And given that we’re all doing it, I believe evolutionary living should be kept in the lower case, a phrase that is like open software, not attributable to one particular interpretation, a uniting phrase.

There are some quirks and differences here and there.  There’s Evolutionary Fitness, there’s the Primal BluePrint, there are differences in training philosophies that I love to read about on Theory To Practice.  There are differences about dairy from Cordaine to Carl Lanore of Super Human Radio.  There are differences among the Atkins crowd like the super hero Jimmy Moore, who respects Michael Pollan, but feels that Pollan’s moniker of “mostly plants” may not be correct.  The one common denominator is that we’re all striving for an evolutionary life, we’re evolutionarily living.  This gets over the “pathway” and “lifestyle” descriptions which sound a bit clunky.  It simply avoids yet includes the meaning of the loaded word “diet.”

I believe this phrase is also a great fit for the inclusion of the striving to learn, to survive, to improve, to risk, to accept life.   This is a big tent, it includes all of those from the Primal/Paleo/EF Tribes.  There’s plenty of room also for those on the edges that are seeking a way to live healthy and being good to each other, regardless of religion or political persuasion, but yet are (eegad!!!) still eating grains (or grass, or rice, or potatoes, or corn or corn in the liquid form, HFCS, etc).  However, once you change your diet to the one you were designed to eat (or close variation there of), a perspective begins to take shape that envisions a world in which this would be possible for everyone.  This inherently means a world with voluntary labor and property rights.  And this may mean a world where we may be on different ends of the spectrum on many things, but one in which we’re all on the same side of the barricades in evolutionary living.