Recent events have impacted my rigorous adherence to the ancestral fitness paradigm.  Part of it was the holidays—Christmas and New Year’s—they are celebratory times, and I bet even the most rigorous ancestral geek is from time to time tempted.  Part of it was my own extracurricular happenings—my Christmas Eve birthday, my new baby’s birth on 29 December, the whole stress level associated with that issue.  And since my wife is Russian, we also celebrate Orthodox Christmas (January 7) and Orthodox New Year’s (January 14).

That’s a lot of opportunities to eat processed crap.

And when your daughters look at you with beaming faces, offering up the German chocolate cake they baked, umm, that ain’t really the time to say, “Get thee behind me, Sugar!  I reject you and all your works!”  Sure, I could have said that, and broken their dear little hearts, but in all honesty, there’s no way I’d tell my daughters that, on my birthday, when they’d baked me a cake.

So I had some cake.

And not just cake, either.  I’ve dipped back into the land of processed carbs over the last couple of weeks, and I don’t feel particularly bad about it.  Check that, I don’t feel particularly bad in a moral way about that.  I do, on the other hand, feel physically bad.

The Healthcare Epistemocrat writes about self-experimentation, and I have taken it to heart.  There are, of course, positive and negative experiments.  Positive experimentation is most of what I’ve done—moving away from grains, moving away from HFCS, moving away from processed foods in general, supplementing with Vitamin D, making an effort to get more sunshine, all the good stuff that is involved in this paleo/primal/ancestral/evolutionary fitness tao.  I’ve liked the results I’ve had—otherwise, well, I wouldn’t be writing this stuff, would I?

Going hand in hand with positive experimentation is negative experimentation.  Sometimes you need to see if the positive results you’ve had are based in what you’ve done, or if there was something else going on, unobserved, that was responsible.  You want to eat that Twinkie?  Go ahead!  Then pay attention to how you feel.

So I ate the cake, I ate some pizza, I “backslid” and I kept an eye on how I felt.  I felt horrible.  The sugar rush like to blew my head off, and then the slow sickening slide into lassitude and torpor took place, that logy feeling came down to sit on me.  When I’m in full paleo mode, and I gorge on a pound or more of good beef, pork or lamb, I end up with the feeling of being “agile full.”  Full, that is, but with the feeling that if I had to go play a game of ultimate Frisbee, or throw a spear at an invader, or sprint for the trees to get away from an unexpected predatory megafauna, I could do it.  The sugar full, the carb full, the processed full—those are entirely different from the agile full.

The sugar/carb/processed full is when you want to lean back, undo your belt, and nap, because you can’t do anything except digest.  Probably not actual glycemic shock, but the next worst thing.

That “sick full” feeling, however, is a very temporary thing.  It goes away after an hour or two.  What other symptoms can we observe?  (In the patient of one mythos, you are responsible for self-observing and thinking about your state instead of outsourcing responsibility for your health to strangers.)

I got sick again.  For years, before I did the gut check and paleo’d up, I suffered from ongoing, recurrent upper respiratory problems I dubbed the “creeping crud.”  The creeping crud was a cough, and a phlegmy feeling, and a general constriction of the respiratory system that was moderately debilitating.  I had that crud for weeks if not months at a time, recurring throughout the year.  When I went paleo, the creeping crud went away.

After going paleo almost 18 months ago, I was only sick once, with common cold symptoms that lasted three days from onset to resolution.  Yes, I upped my dosage of vitamins C and D.

This negative experimentation brought back the creeping crud.  It sat in my lungs and lingered, I spat up mucus, I felt constricted and restrained.  Yes, I upped my dosage of vitamins C and D, and no, it didn’t seem to ameliorate the problem.  I felt under the weather, and my eldest daughter turned around the diagnosis I used when she was ailing: she said I had sad sick little eyes.

You can call it backsliding if you want–sometimes I do, too.  But I prefer to call it negative experimentation.  I checked my progress, I dipped a toe back into the standard American diet, and I experienced the results: a near-immediate degradation of health.  No problem, though.  I know what I did wrong, I know what to do right, I’m already recalibrating the meals we’ll be putting together.  I checked my premises, and found my premises to be correct: eating ancestrally (primally/paleolithically/evolutionarily) increases health, eating the modern diet decreases health.  I’m back on track.  My negative experimentation has demonstrated that I was doing the right things, and that turning away from them imposes negative health consequences, and I’m ready to resume right living.

Don’t call it backsliding!  (Well, ok, I backslid.)  

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Uncle Lew. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.