Upon finishing my Doctorate, I reconnected with my advisor from my Masters degree, Dr. Loren Cordain, who was well into his research of paleolithic nutrition.  Although Loren’s thinking was questioned at that time by traditional nutritionists, it made perfect sense to me, and, more importantly, Loren was researching areas of nutrition of which the average nutritionist would be extremely unaware.  Further, every point that Loren was making was backed up by a reference from a scientific paper.  Along with Dr. Lynn Toohey, Loren and I spent an incredible amount of time discussing, lecturing, and working with individuals that might benefit from implementing the paleolithic diet.  In particular, we ended up talking with individuals with autoimmune diseases who wanted to implement the diet.  The exciting discovery, to what was nothing more than a theory at the time, was that every individual who followed the diet either improved or went into complete remission with their condition.  Since that time, a significant body of research has shown that the paleolithic way of eating provides the most effective nutritional template to optimize health and prevent and even reverse disease.  I have also continued to help individuals improve their health by applying paleolithic nutrition for more than ten years; the success rates for those that have consistently employed the principles have continued to remain at 100%.

At the same time that I began working with Dr. Cordain, I also began working with Dr. Juris Terauds, the former department chair from the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at Colorado State University.  Dr. Terauds was the founder of the International Society of Biomechanics in Sport and was a world-renowned sports biomechanist.  At that point in time, Dr. Terauds was working on perfecting exercise equipment that could be used for short-duration, high-intensity exercise.  As a researcher at numerous Olympic games, it was Dr. Terauds’ observation that the sprint athletes, as compared to the endurance athletes, were healthier and even lived longer.  For me, this observation turned into a research pursuit in both the laboratory as well as the scientific literature.  It has now become a mission that has also lasted over ten years.  What was discovered was that because the early sport science research focused almost exclusively on low-moderate intensity, continuous activity, this became the recommended mode of exercise for overall fitness and in particular, cardiovascular health.  This recommendation rang loud from the research, medical, and fitness communities.  Although this type of training clearly has a training effect, it has since been shown, in the scientific literature as well as within the fitness community, that Dr. Terauds’ initial observations held significant validity.  As well as successfully improving ones cardiovascular health and fitness, short-duration, high-intensity exercise has far more health benefits than one sees engaging in what I now think of as an old fashioned way to train, namely, low-moderate intensity, continuous exercise.  Ironically, it is the sprint interval training that is old fashioned as it is this form of activity that shaped our exercise requirements during primitive times.  We didn’t “jog” for 20 to 60 minutes at a time to get our food or to avoid becoming some predators food!  Further, if we had not got so caught up in the early sport science research we would have realized that the vast majority of athletes out in the sporting world gain their incredible fitness levels by engaging in sprint interval training.  The most significant aspect of this clarification of exercise training is that sprint interval training requires significantly less time to be invested as compared to the continuous endurance training.  And, of course, what do we complain to have less of in our hectic modern lives!  Although nearly all respected conditioning coaches in the field now support this thinking toward exercise, it is still amazing how mis-informed many in the medical and fitness communities still are.  Anyway, just as with nutrition, it turns out that paleolithic exercise is also the best exercise template!

Some individuals may complete a Doctoral degree in human physiology and come away feeling that they have mastered nearly all that there is to know.  Although I learned a great deal, I came away from my experience realizing how little we actually know about the miracle we call the human body. I learned more about how to evaluate information rather than the information itself.  This thinking has helped me become better at helping people achieve optimal health and vitality by keeping an open mind to the information that regularly comes before me.  It has afforded me the opportunity to work with some incredible individuals that are realizing success in areas of health that traditional approaches have not.  If I hadn’t had this approach to listening about human health, I would have dismissed so much information that has clearly benefited many, Dr. Cordain’s work with paleolithic nutrition being the most obvious example.  At that point in time, his thinking was very much against the grain, pardon the pun!

There are millions of health care professionals worldwide and a growing segment of this industry is now focused on the prevention of disease and optimization of health and vitality.  Otherwise known as the Wellness Industry, this segment of the healthcare industry has a vast array of ideas and concepts when it comes to implementing a program of disease prevention and wellness with no firm consensus as to the correct way to achieve that goal.  So, it is probably worth knowing a little bit about me and my background before listening to my way of approaching a lifestyle modification toward the goal of enhanced health and vitality.