Everything We Know About Nutrition Is Wrong...?

Hi, thanks for visiting my blog! I'd like to start off with a few facts and ideas to dip our feet into the nutrition world, and will expand from here. Please feel free to share your thoughts and responses in the comment section below.

I recently came across the website of Zoe Harcombe, a British nutritionist and researcher, who points out some nutritional fallacies that have permeated our collective conventional wisdom. Included is the "calorie myth"- the idea that 3,500 = one pound of fat so no matter what foods you are eating you just need to create that deficit to lose weight. As she points out in her myths & facts page, "If the calorie theory were correct, every human would lose 104 lbs every year, with a 1,000 calorie a day deficit (no matter their gender, starting weight etc)".

I really enjoyed the quote below that was found on her website home page, which puts it into perspective why it's so important to eat like our ancestors as opposed to how we have been eating in the last 40ish years.

“If we have been eating food in the form that nature intended for 24 hours, agriculture (large scale access to carbohydrates) developed four minutes ago and sugar consumption has increased twenty fold in the last five seconds. I wonder which food is more likely to be responsible for obesity, diabetes, or indeed any modern disease…”

Robb Wolf makes a similar analogy in his book The Paleo Solution, where he compared human evolution to a 100-yard American football field. If we walked from one end to the other, 99.5 yards of those would represent all of human history except the last 5,000 years or so. The last 1/2 yard represents the transition from hunter/gatherer existence to agriculture, and "the last few inches represent television, the Internet, refined vegetable oils, and most of what we take to be 'normal' modern living."

I think it's pretty unbelievable that we have evolved in that last 1/2 yard to be able to effectively process the high amount of grains and starchy carbohydrates we currently consume, and I find it extremely unbelievable that we have evolved to consume any of the overly-processed Franken-foods that permeate our modern diet.

What do you think? Do these human evolution analogies blow your mind as it did mine? Does these ideas offend, shock or excite you? Please share your thoughts below!

Holistic Wellness & Blog Manifesto

Hello!

Thanks for visiting my first blog post! I've decided to create a blog designed to share all of the wonderful things I'll be learning along my journey to becoming a certified health coach, and ultimately my transition into a profession that thus far has no title because I'm sort of inventing it, but I am going to call a Holistic Wellness Counselor for now. If you'd like know more about this endeavor and to support me on this journey, please consider funding or sharing my IndieGoGo campaign and follow my blog here.

I think that for now this blog will be much about sharing a lot of the information I'm learning and connecting you to other resources because I have been seriously geeking out on diet and nutrition stuff, and I have a lot of really interesting things to share. I've recently converted from a vegetarian-plus-fish diet to a Paleo diet and have just finished about 30 days of Paleo. I feel great and I think this is going to be close to how I will eat long-term, but this is NOT going to be a Paleo blog. My belief is that diet is not a one-size-fits-all thing and that there are many different perspectives on diet that all have really valid arguments and important things to learn. There are some things about a vegetarian/vegan diet that I can get behind, and some things about Paleo that I can agree with, too.

Although right now I'm really delving into diet and nutrition, I'm also a workout junkie, and if you read my IndieGoGo campaign bio, you'll see that becoming a personal trainer is "Phase 3" of my plan to becoming a Holistic Wellness Counselor (btw, if anyone has suggestions for a better title of a therapist, nutrition coach, and personal trainer hybrid, I'm all ears!) so eventually I will incorporate a lot of fitness stuff into the blog as well.

Lastly, I am a Marriage and Family Therapist (so close to my LPC license- just a few months away!) and I plan on doing a lot of work on the mind-body-brain connection, or incorporating mental health with physical wellness. So that's sort of my blog manifesto. If that sounds at all interesting to you, please join me on this journey and follow my blog!

Thank you for reading!!
Lorraine