by Uncle Lew

Around the middle of May, one evening I was sitting at home, sipping on a glass of Evan Walker black label whiskey, which I was doing in honor of a friend of mine who had written the beginnings of a novel, with the hero named Evan Walker in honor of my friend’s years of experience with the whiskey, when my head started to hurt.

Although I’ve had generally good health for almost all my life, I’ve had headaches before.  Generally, the root cause has been spinal misalignment, which I’ve treated through visits to the chiropractor for adjustment.  My family has a history with chiropractics going back to the 1950s, when my grandfather was hit by a train, and finally turned to a chiropractor after several back surgeries had failed to ameliorate his pain, but that’s neither here nor there, because this headache wasn’t caused by spinal misalignment.

This headache was different.

This headache started off as a slight ache on the left side of the roof of my mouth, which then migrated up through the left side of my sinus cavities and centered in my left temple, with a feeling like . . . well, like it really hurt.  My left eye was tearing, and my nose was running with mucous from the left nostril.  Light and sound sensitivity were pronounced.

Pain is funny, because it’s hard to describe.  It can’t be weighed and measured, it must be experienced by the individual.  This pain was pretty bad.  It was bad enough that I went to bed in the early evening and slept through to early morning.  I woke up early, and the headache came screaming back.

These things pass, I told myself.  A couple of headaches, never you mind, I’ll be fine.  We’ll ignore that the pain was bad enough that I slept in the living room, so that my whimpering and thrashing around didn’t disturb my wife or the baby.  These things pass.

By this point, the weekend had rolled around, and I was reluctant to go to the emergency room when, the next night, the headache came back.  There are a few things that I trust Western medicine to handle, like trauma surgery, but in terms of other illnesses or complaints, well, not so much.  Besides, I couldn’t drive in the condition I was in, and having my wife drive me, with the kids in tow, down to the ER to sit for three or four hours was no idea of fun.  Less idea of fun, in fact, than the killer headache I had.

I banished my two elder daughters from their room to go sleep with Mommy and the baby, and I slept in their room.  The expression of the headache was the same: pain in the roof of the mouth, migrating up through the sinuses and then centering in the temple, right between my ear and eyebrow, pain that finally abated when I fell asleep.

Saturday morning my Russian wife was growing concerned, and we decided to check my blood pressure.  140/105.  This did nothing to calm her nerves, and she began to access the network.  You’ve probably got a network as well—friends, acquaintances.  Our friend Olga knew a Russian born and trained doctor, who thought the BP could be at fault, and who suggested soaking my arms in the sink in water as hot as I could stand.  I tried it, and guess what?  It worked.

I filled the sink with water as hot as I could stand, and forced my arms down into it.  After a minute or two, I could feel the piercing pain begin to subside.  It also brought down my blood pressure.  I hate to waste liquor, so I had my wife, Natasha, pour out the Evan Walker.  I figured that maybe I just had a reaction to that whiskey.  Couldn’t be anything else, could it?

Except the headaches continued during the weekend, in the evenings, coming on an hour or two before midnight.  If I went to sleep before then, the pain was bad enough that it woke me up.  I’d soak my arms in hot water for some relief, but I was beginning to grow seriously concerned.  When the headaches would come on, I’d check my blood pressure; heck, I was checking blood pressure even without the headaches.  During the day, my BP was running around 130/90.

Monday I went to see my chiropractor for an adjustment, but Monday night the headache came back.  Since the expression of the headache was different than the headaches I’d had in the past, I wasn’t too surprised that the origin was different.  My chiropractor recommended, the next day, a doctor he knew who preferred to avoid the “hey let’s give him a pill” approach I’ve seen far too often in modern Western medicine, and I made an appointment to see him the next day.

The appointment went well.  He had a nice, small office, and he spent time with me—right at forty five minutes, with me explaining my symptoms, him discussing his philosophy of treatment, which was more oriented towards finding out what the underlying causes were, vice simply pushing pills to mask symptoms.  (If I sound somewhat bitter about traditional Western medicine, or traditional modern Western medicine, well, this is for the Paleo Garden, and if you’re Paleo or leaning Paleo, you probably share my opinion.)  Blood was drawn and sent out for analysis, and he advised supplementing with magnesium and avoiding alcohol, caffeine and nicotine pending further results.

Things got better.  Not all the way better, but some better.  I felt, every day, as if I was walking on eggshells, dreading the return of the pain.  Every night, my fears were rewarded: the headaches came back.  NSAIDs were no help.  I wasn’t drinking, was barely smoking, and was severely limiting my caffeine intake, and the pain was still there, still coming on each evening, usually around midnight.  I kept looking around on the internet, trying to figure out what could be causing the headaches, and I kept checking my blood pressure.  During the day, my blood pressure was running 125/85, plus or minus five points.  I kept a running log of the blood pressure, and began to suspect that, contra my earlier thoughts, the elevated blood pressure wasn’t so much a cause of the headaches but a symptom.  I began to barrage my friends and family with e-mails that tracked what was going on, both to keep them informed and to force me to track my condition.

I began to think it was migraines.  I’d had what I thought was a bout with migraines about nine years ago, for a couple of weeks, but they’d gone away and, as the pain receded so did my concern.  I read up on migraines, until one of my friends, under the barrage of e-mails, suggested that it could be, not migraines, but an attack of cluster headaches.  I read up on cluster headaches.

The symptoms seemed to track.  The headache was always—always—on the left side, the headaches came on very rapidly, the pain was very bad, the pain would wake me up if I was asleep.  I decided to thinker with the epistemology of my health care, to check my-thology.  I’d mentioned the unquantifiability of pain earlier, and said that it was pretty bad.  As I read up on cluster headaches I learned that one of their nicknames was “the suicide headache” because sufferers from them contemplated suicide to get away from the pain.

The next time a headache came on—it woke me up at 12:45 in the morning—I made two cups of coffee and drank them, along with a hot, hot shower.  The pain began to recede.  The pain went away.  Of course, I was also now awake at 3 in the morning and having trouble going back to sleep, but the very quick relief from pain was, I felt, a step in the right direction.

By this point it was time to go back to see the doctor.  My blood work was ready and the results were in.  When I mentioned my tentative (self) diagnosis, he nodded and agreed.  “I was pretty sure,” he said, “that the blood pressure levels you were reporting weren’t high enough to be a cause, but rather a symptom, of your headaches.”  We discussed possible causes and treatments.  He wrote me a prescription for a highly addictive painkiller, but suggested that I hold off on filling the prescription until I felt I had to.  (I did hold off, and continue to do so.)  He further recommended supplementation with 5-HTP to enhance serotonin levels.

This was last week.  On the way home from his office, I stopped by GNC and picked up 5-HTP as well as refilling my D3 vitamin supplements.  Each evening, I take 100 mg of 5-HTP with my D3, B complex, C and E vitamins, right after dinner.  Then I have a cup of coffee.  My blood pressure is tracking at the same 125/85 +/- 5.  I haven’t had a headache since I started.

I’m still weaning myself off of coffee—I used to drink a lot, I used to drink it all day, it was my drug of choice—and I’m still weaning myself off of cigarettes.  (Yes, yes, nasty habit, very non-Paleo, pure self-destructiveness, I know, I know.)  The headaches haven’t come back.  I’m clinging to that.

Calling this “The Headache Diaries” sounds like it would be a continuing series, but I sure hope it won’t be.  Hopefully this is the last chapter. I’m sleeping better, I’m feeling better, I’m coming back.  Nothing I have written here should be construed, in any way, as medical advice.  I’m not a doctor, and the treatment regimen I’m on was undertaken in consultation with a doctor who evaluated me, who evaluated my symptoms, who looked at me individually, and who, in addition, prefers to avoid the practices of modern Western medicine.  He is, however, a MD licensed to practice in Texas.

What this experience has offered me is both a reminder of the uncertainty of life and the importance of ongoing self-analysis.  I started off thinking it was the blood pressure, then thought it was migraines, then settled on a diagnosis of cluster headaches.  I didn’t just turn to an outside specialist and say, “here I am, make me well.”  I thought about myself, my symptoms, my pain, what seemed to help, what seemed to hurt.  I self-experimented—-one day I had a couple of Dos Equis lagers, which brought the headache screaming back, not at its usual time, in about an hour.

Physician, heal thyself?  I can buy that, but add a subclause:  patient, heal thyself.

Check out Uncle Lew’s other posts here on The Paleo Garden.

I have always thought that the pursuit of ancestral fitness involved at least two layers.  Maybe, like onions, and ogres, and parfait, ancestral fitness is simply a thing of layers.  There is the simple game, and the deep game.  Inevitably, the more one pursues this thing we call ancestral fitness, the deeper one goes.  This is, of course, true of almost everything, not only onions, ogres and parfait.  (That’s a Mike Myers reference, kids!)

The two levels?  There is the advanced, complex level, where we throw around phrases like glycemic index, ketogenesis and epigenetics.  And there’s the simple level, where we say things like “eat real food.”  Both levels are working towards a similar goal—a basically fit human, but they’re vastly different in terms of the depth and sophistication with which they approach that goal.

Inside baseball is looking to build Mark Sisson, to build Arthur de Vany.  Inside baseball is looking to maximize human performance.  Inside baseball is all about applying the serious study of human anatomy and physiology to take the raw human meat and make it, in the words of the old Army commercial, all it can be.

Both Mark and Art provide excellent, introductory level guides to ancestral fitness, Mark with his Primal Blueprint and Art with his Essay on Evolutionary Fitness.  Both of them, however, operate at a much higher level than just “eating real food.”

Unfortunately, the deeper you get into the game, the weirder and more abstruse you sound to outsiders.  There have been times when I would attempt to explain ancestral fitness to someone and their eyes would glaze over.  My enthusiasm would lead me to start reeling off phrases like “insulin resistance” and “ketogenesis,” “catabolic state” and “glycemic index.”  TEGO.  (Their Eyes Glaze Over)  When you’re talking to a layman, even an interested layman, about ancestral/paleo/primal/evolutionary fitness and you launch into a discursion on the ratios of omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids in grass fed vice grain fed beef, you are liable to scare off a potential convert.

I mean, meat is meat, right?

On the one hand, yes.  On the other hand, no.  Come on—after delving into ancestral fitness and doing the background readings, we all know that grass fed, grass finished, hormone free, antibiotic free beef is an entirely different product than what I like to call “industrial meat.”

It’s fun to deepen our understanding of ancestral fitness, and to explore, further, how to self-experiment and tinker with our bodies.  It’s pleasant to be able to converse with our fellows at a high level of sophistication.  It’s tremendously satisfying to feel that we can pierce the veil of misunderstanding, and arrive at a better mythology of how our bodies work.

But that’s inside baseball.

While confessing this might jeopardize my status as a good American, I don’t really pay attention to baseball.  I may watch a game from time to time, but I do so more to hang out with my friends in a convivial atmosphere than to actually follow the game.  I understand the basics of baseball—three strikes and your out, four balls and you walk, nine innings with a stretch in the seventh.  When things get beyond that, my poor head starts to ache.  I think I’m smart enough to understand baseball, if I spent the time to learn more about it, but time is fungible and there are other things I’d rather understand, or try to understand.  Baseball just isn’t that important to me.

I understand baseball at a very superficial level.

Let me hasten, now, to point out that there’s nothing wrong with having a superficial understanding of things.  While I consider myself a student of history, there are vast swaths of history that I understand only superficially.  I am aware that Sir Francis Walsingham was a counselor and spymaster to Queen Elizabeth I of England.  That’s pretty superficial.  I’ve spoken with a real student of Elizabethan history, who had devoted many long hours to Walsingham.  I was humbled by how little I knew . . . but I was able to follow along when the information was presented in an easily digestible manner.

The world is full of people who are eating the Standard American Diet (SAD), who could be helped with even a superficial understanding of ancestral fitness.  If we have any interest in helping people, we need to be able to communicate our information at a superficial level.

Fortunately, we can do that.  Ancestral fitness is, at its base, a simple concept.  For better health, eat like your ancestors did.  There!  Isn’t that simple?

Starting in the 1970s, the United States government changed its recommendations for what we should eat.  A much higher emphasis was placed on a high consumption of grains, while foods high in saturated fat were deemphasized, shunned and abjured.  A breakfast of bacon, eggs and buttered toast gave way to a breakfast of oatmeal.  At the same time, processed foods became much more popular, as “food science” applied scientific principles to the production, packaging and distribution of food.  These changes occurred as an experiment in making us fitter and healthier.  If you are in (very early) middle age like me, you have seen the experiment play out before your eyes.  Has it worked?

Have rates of obesity, diabetes, or coronary artery disease remained the same, declined, or increased?  Are we healthier now than we were then?  Have the changes we made to our diet worked for us?  If your answers are that obesity, diabetes and coronary artery disease have all increased, and that we are not noticeably healthier now than we were then, how could we change things?

An easy answer would be “Eat real food.”  What is real food?  Real food is food your grandmother, when she was a young woman, would have recognized as food.  Real food isn’t shelf-stable, for months and months.  Real food isn’t highly processed.  Real food doesn’t have a long, long list of ingredients.  Read the ingredient lists and avoid anything with high fructose corn syrup.  Eat less bread, pasta, grains and potatoes.  Don’t buy convenient foods.  Don’t buy food you have seen advertised on television.

There’s lots more we could say about ancestral fitness.  There’s lots more, in fact, that we do say about ancestral fitness–that’s why we blog, that’s why we comment, that’s why we try to push our understanding further.  The superficial description listed above, however, could serve as the introduction.  Three strikes and you’re out, four balls and you walk, nine innings and a stretch in the seventh.

How much more do you need to know?  Do you need to know the biochemistry of carbohydrate breakdown?  Do you need to have a firm grasp on whether its carbohydrates themselves, or insulin, or inflammation, that supplies the underlying mechanism poisoning your body?  How does the old joke go?  “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”  “Don’t do it any more.”

Inside baseball—or rather, inside paleo—-is about building Spartans, whether of the Leonidas or HALO versions.

Outside baseball—or rather, outside paleo—is about reducing the chronic poisoning of the human body that is an inevitable consequence of the deficiencies of the standard American diet.  We don’t all have to be Mark Sisson, we don’t all have to be Arthur de Vany.  A lot of people will never have the time or interest in pursuing that level of health and fitness.  But if we can explain a few simple steps that will help people get started on the way to better health, and better fitness, we can help a lot of people.  Hundreds?  Surely.  Thousands?  Probably.  Millions?  Why not.

With all due apologies to GEICO, ancestral fitness really is so simple even a caveman could do it.  

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.)  

I don’t watch all that much television.  Sometimes it really does remind me of a line from a song from a while back—100 channels and nothing’s on!—except I’ve got more than 100 channels.  I used to watch the news, but now I get my news, mostly, from the internet, scanning a half-dozen or so regular outlets that cater to my tastes.  And I used to watch “Hill Street Blues” and “The X-files” and all sorts of I don’t know what, but just name dropping those shows tells you how long its been.

If I’m neutral leaning towards dismissive of television in general, I’m generally even less enthusiastic about reality television.  To the best of my information and belief after reasonable inquiry, I’ve never seen a single episode of Real  Housewives (of any place), or Flava Flav or Bret Michaels’ shows.  (I am, in fact, pretty much amazed that I was able to pluck the name Bret Michaels out of the air.)  Jon and Kate plus Eight?  Minus me.  All of these shows evoke a reaction in me similar to fingernails on a chalkboard.  I shake my head sadly and then, like a character in a Lovecraft story, flee shrieking from the room while my brain dribbles out my ears.

With all of that as prologue, however, I occasionally find a show I like.  I found one, and thanks to streaming video, watched the complete run, and now I’m writing about it.  The show is Fight Quest.

Fight Quest was a show on the Discovery channel. It ran for one season, and after cancellation extra episodes were released, thirteen episodes in total.  I really quite liked it.  The set-up was simple: two American martial artists travel the world, studying martial arts, and then applying their arts in matches.  The show’s hosts, Jimmy Smith and Doug Anderson, traveled to Japan, China, Hong Kong, India, Brazil, Los Angeles and six other centers of martial arts to train in various and diverse styles.

Jimmy Smith is a former match teacher from Los Angeles who became a MMA fighter, and Doug Anderson was a New Jersey boy who served in the US Army in Iraq, and then also became a MMA fighter.  Each episode of Fight Quest adopts a bifurcated narrative: Smith and Anderson arrive and meet the masters of various arts, train separately, and then reunite at the end of the show for a closing fight to demonstrate what they’ve learned.  The bifurcated narrative is enhanced because there is generally a breakdown between traditional and “street” training, reflected in a pastoral setting for the one and an urban setting for the other.

Here are the things I like about Fight Quest.  First off, I like the fact that Smith and Anderson are fit.  You might even say that they’re in fighting trim (which is where I think we all should be).  You can see their muscles and their bones when they move.  I don’t know what regime they use for fitness–maybe they’re on a bad diet and compensate with cardio, lots of cardio.  I’d prefer that they were paleo . . . but as long as they’re fit, I’m happy.

I like the fact that they visit with martial arts masters from various cultures and countries, and everyone is respectful.  For me this is a powerful affirmation of my core conviction that strength reduces conflict.  Yeah, they’re training in fighting, and they fight in the end, but these are essentially exhibitions—the guys Smith and Anderson train with work hard, share their knowledge, help correct errors in form, and get along with our two gringos.  (It helps, of course, that our two gringos also work hard and are polite and respectful.)  I watched all thirteen episodes, and in every one I saw a genuine desire to teach and a genuine desire to learn, in every one I saw guys who were at the top of their sphere who were calm, kind, considerate . . . and made our two gringos punch walls, and other such stunts.

I liked the spiritual dimension.  As I think back, the only episode that didn’t incorporate a spiritual dimension to training was the episode set in America, dealing with KaJuKenBo.  Maybe that says more about America than about martial arts in general?  Remember, I think health is a three legged stool, with a healthy body, a healthy mind, and a healthy spirit combining for support.  From watching the Fight Quest episodes, it seems that I’m not alone in that thought.

I liked the bifurcated approach.  Every art grows, adapts, evolves, to meet its current situation.  That’s just how things are.  The country/city divide used in Fight Quest demonstrates that evolutionary process.  Plus, it doubles the number of masters for each art, and allows us to see not just one man’s approach (or one woman’s!) but two approaches.  (Yes yes, the statistical sampling of two kali masters isn’t large enough to be determinative.)  Plus, the fighting style, level of experience, and general approach of Smith and Anderson differed, which made the experience more informative and entertaining.

Without down, however, there is no up.  There were things I didn’t like about the show, and I’ll try and run through them here.  First off, I have to invoke Howard Cosell.   Particularly, I’ll adopt the “I never played the game” defense, cribbed from the title of one of Cosell’s books.  When I criticize things about MMA, or Fight Quest, or parkour, I am explicitly criticizing them from the sidelines, or even more accurately, from a La-Z-Boy in my den.  I’m an outsider, and my criticisms are an outsider’s criticisms, and should not be taken as dispositive or authoritative.

First off, particularly early in the show’s run, there seemed to be more than a touch of American exceptionalism.  Maybe it was just a fighter’s natural confidence, verging on arrogance, but I was flabbergasted at the thought that someone could study a martial art for five days and then have any expectation of beating someone, at that art, who had been studying that art for years and years.  As the show’s run went along, this attitude seemed to get beaten out of the hosts.

One thing that kind of irked me was the “sport” mentality Anderson and Smith displayed.  When they’d encounter a particularly brutal style, they’d express shock: this is for fighting, you would hear them say, not for fun, not for sport.  Well, dobroe utro, as the Russians say (”good morning!”).  Sport grows out of day to day activities, and for a lot of human existence, if fighting wasn’t a day to day activity, it was something that could come up on any given day.  That we rarely, today, have to engage in a hand-to-hand struggle to survive is a very new thing in human existence.  I’m glad we don’t have to do things like that, but I know, deep down, that we might have to.  This is a minor quibble, but I wanted to mention it.

Another thing I noticed was weak American legs, and slow American arms.  The focus of the show seemed to be on arts that emphasized rapid strikes, lateral movement and lots of flexibility.  Both Smith and Anderson, to differing degrees, seemed more comfortable with a boxing based style: slower but heavier punches, and a more back-and-forth movement style.  The leaping kicks in kalarippayattu were well, well beyond Smith and Anderson’s capabilities, and Smith mentioned in several episodes that flexibility wasn’t his bag, baby.  Once more, this is a comparative judgment, and both Smith and Anderson are stronger, faster and more flexible than I am, by far.  It was simply eye-opening to see that there were other cultures where flexibility was so much higher than it is in America.  I’m reminded of this every time I think about the Central Asian squat.

Hey, I call it the Central Asian squat, because it was everywhere when I was in Central Asia.

One last small complaint.  From some of the reading I’ve done about the show, part of the appeal was in the exoticism.  They wanted to go to Indonesia, to the Philippines, to China, to Japan—they wanted to play up the exotic, and there’s nothing wrong with that!  I, for one, quite enjoy learning about other cultures.  I just wished that, in the fullness of time, more traditional Western arts would have been explored.  However, I can’t complain too much.  Although I’d love to have seen some Russian sambo, some Cornish wrestling, even some Mongolian wrestling.  (And then again, I’m just a sucker for Mongolia, so maybe that’s coloring my opinions.)

In sum, then, I quite liked Fight Quest.  I liked the fitness displayed by the hosts and all the martial artists they studied with.  I liked the camaraderie and warmth the fighters showed each other.  I liked the reminder that a healthy spirit is important just as a healthy body and a healthy mind are.  I liked being reminded that every culture throughout history has had to fight to defend itself (and/or oppress others, but that’s neither here nor there, ni tut i ne tam as the Russians say).  I liked being reminded, in short, that there are still wolves among the dogs, all over the world.

I’m not ordinarily a big fan of television, but I really enjoyed this show.