The Paleo Dieter's Missing Link: The Complete, Practical Guide To Living The Paleo Diet

World

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

When I first started down the path on my own Paleo journey in 2004, I never envisioned that the Paleo community would be where it is today. There essentially wasn't a Paleo community in 2004, and it was a massive struggle to find information and resources related to health and diet that were insightful and intelligent.

I never thought that those early years of illness, fear and dietary confusion would be the foundation upon which I'd stand—healed, strong and renewed—as a health and fitness author.

In those dark early years, Paleo was barely a blip on the radar screen. In fact, I didn't even refer to the diet I was eating as Paleo. It was just a weird diet that I had to eat because there was stuff wrong with me. And, of course, there was stuff wrong with me because of bad luck—not through any fault of my own or of mainstream ideas, lifestyle or modern food.

As I write this in 2013, Paleo is just about a household word. Just yesterday, it was featured in a positive light on the Dr. Oz show. I'm almost able to take for granted that people will know what I'm talking about when I say Paleo diet now, and I'm even surprised when they don't.

If you've come to the Paleo diet and the Paleo community recently—say, post- 2010—you're extremely lucky. There are more Paleo resources and recipes and blogs and books than you could probably read in a lifetime. Knowledge and information are abundant.

I've worked to refine and build upon what I created in 2011. The original work was a little rough but made up for that lack of refinement in its passion and energy. The book you're reading benefits from both more maturity on my part as an author and Paleo devotee and from the help and resources of a team of people more experienced than I in editing, designing and publishing books.

If You Bought the First Edition

If you bought The Paleo Dieter’s Missing Link when it first came out as an eBook in 2011, thank you. Not only did those original purchases give me the encouragement to keep writing and keep expanding my work, they also provided me with an income for nearly two years—an income that allowed me to continue to follow a career as a writer and keep living as Paleo as I could manage.

So, first and foremost, thank you. But, thank you isn't really enough to make buying a second edition worthwhile, is it?

In this second edition of The Paleo Dieter’s Missing Link, readers of the first edition will find the following enhancements and new sections:

1. New and expanded sections and discussions about lifestyle

2. A completely new section on staying motivated and setting goals

3. A cleaner, more polished overall presentation

If This Is Your First Exposure to The Paleo Dieter’s Missing Link

Rest assured that you'll get everything that made the first edition such an underground success, with the addition of even more insight, new sections and a more finished and polished product. You'll also have the pleasure of reading the book either in a hardcover or on an eReader device with full features, whereas the readers of the original only had a PDF version or one of the very few comb-bound printed copies that I had made.

Thank you for buying this book and for your support. I truly hope this book is an eye-opening, educational and unique resource that helps you along the way on your own Paleo journey.

Please keep in touch and let me know how you like the book.

Adam Farrah

Old Saybrook, Connecticut

(Still here in Saybrook and never more relieved and happy to be home.)

Spring 2013

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

This is a book I knew I was going to write for a long time.

In the fall of 2004, I owned a big house with two big mortgages, worked a highstress corporate biotech job, slept fewer than five or six hours a night and had just started an evening MBA program. I drank tons of coffee. Everything about my life was rushed and stressed. Of course, everyone would have expected me to remain healthy despite the schedule and the stress—after all, I was working out all the time, jogging almost daily and eating a very healthy diet of chicken breasts, protein shakes, whole grains, protein bars, granola bars, name-brand yogurt and plenty of vitamins and supplements.

I soon found out I was far from healthy.

After nearly dying from ulcerative colitis, I began a long battle with digestive illness, chronic fatigue, depression, anxiety and a host of other health issues. Of course I, and anyone in the mainstream establishment I came across, attributed my problems to bad luck. All the conventional doctors I saw (save for one) couldn't—and wouldn't— do anything but medicate symptoms with drugs that usually made the symptoms worse or caused other problems. I was told over and over again: There's no known cause for your illness and no known cure. All we can do is 'manage your disease' with drugs. Diet has nothing to do with it. I even had the head of gastroenterology at a major university hospital recommend I eat bread because my diet of only raw fruit smoothies and steamed vegetables—which seemed to be making me feel better and reduce the pain of digestion—wasn't of adequate nutrition and that nutrient nutrient deficiencies might result without bread. Bread...

I also made the rounds to various alternative medical people. All of them proved useless as well, and most were only interested in selling high-priced supplements or advancing their own dogmatic ideas. None had any answers, but all were more than happy to accept money in exchange for an opinion, some tests and some useless bottles of crap that didn't help or made me feel worse.

I spent years sick and exhausted. My boundless creativity and energy were gone. It took all I had to drag myself to a job I hated so I could sit at a desk and collect a paycheck. I still worked out and did karate, but my training was lackluster and interrupted time and time again by digestive problems, from moderate to severe. I made more than one trip to an emergency room due to dehydration, anemia and severe intestinal inflammation. Each time it was the same story: Diet has nothing to do with it. You'll need to be on medication for the rest of your life to 'manage your disease.'

My grandfather once said about me: Adam is overconfident and overoptimistic, but he usually turns out to be right. Looking back, it was pretty crazy—I stopped taking the prednisone and other crap they were loading me up with, stopped going to anyone for help, and began reading everything I could get my hands on and experimenting. I tried all sorts of diets, fasting, positive thinking, meditation, yoga and anything that had a remote chance of helping. Every so often, I'd show up in an emergency room when things got out of hand. I'd do just enough conventional treatment to get back on my feet and back to my stressful job, and resume my dietary research and trial and error.

This was all nearly 10 years ago. It's relatively easy to talk about now, but the dayto- day process I went through was excruciating. During that time I examined every aspect of my diet, my past, my goals, my thinking, my friends, my relationships, my work and my life. It was a battle, and I was literally fighting for my life. And not just my life as in not dying, but in having a good one that I enjoyed and actually wanted to live. I have no doubt that the doctors could have kept me alive—but I'm certain the life I would have had under their care would have been a living hell.

I reached the point where I was determined to regain my health and live the life I wanted or die trying. There would be no lifetime of drugs and surgeries and emergency rooms and gastroenterologists. They all told me I would die if I didn't take medication and do what they told me. They all told me that nothing I did with my diet or lifestyle would help me. It was a risk I was willing to take.

Life on my own terms or death: Those were essentially my two options. At times, I really didn't care which one it was.

Things began to really turn around in 2008, even though I was working yet another stressful and miserable corporate job and still had plenty of negative people and situations in my life. I was doing relatively well on a diet of meats, fruits, vegetables and goat yogurt and had been eating that diet for years. I was still far from healthy, though. At that time, I still thought my training days were over. I was too tired and too out of shape to want to do much of anything. I used to be big and strong and fit and live in the gym. College, then corporate life and illness changed all that. I had lost all of the muscle and strength I had built from a lifetime of weights and training. And now, the diet I needed to be on to stay healthy wasn't anything like the one I needed to be on to get strong and train again. Or so I thought.

Like most, I was deluded by marketing and mainstream nonsense. I thought there was a specific diet you ate for each health problem, a diet you ate to build muscle, a diet you ate to burn fat, a diet you ate for psychological health, a diet you ate to run marathons and on and on. Special diets and special supplements. Like everything else in our modern world, everything was specialized and fractionated, as far as I could tell.

Something Paul Chek's work helped me realize is that there's a basic, foundational way to eat for health—and that health is a foundation you build on for specific needs. Eating to heal a digestive illness may have been my priority at one time, but it was entirely ignorant of me—and of our culture in general—to think that the diet that healed my digestive system couldn't be the diet that would help me achieve strength and performance, psychological health or any other goal.

The application of certain principles or foods might change, but a healthy diet is a healthy diet regardless of goals or specific circumstances. Let me say that again in a different way: There are solid, unchanging principles that make up a diet that is healthy for humans. There is a right and a wrong way to eat.

However there is latitude within the context of that healthy diet, with variations depending on goals, individual health, tolerance for certain foods, genetics and a million other details—but the question of what to eat is not as complex as some would like us to believe. In fact, science tells us what is healthy for us to eat and what is not healthy for us to eat. It's just that the science that tells us this isn't medical science. The science that gives us the answers to the questions we ask about what to eat is anthropology and the related disciplines.

To see our way to a healthy future, we need to use science to look at the past. Evolution shows us what we were designed to eat, how we were designed to live, and how we've declined as a species the further we've drifted from what is natural to us. The future of health and of medicine is in this evolutionary concept, and it will someday be the commonly accepted way to understand health and treat disease.

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

Everything changed for me in 2009 when I read Randy Roach's book Muscle, Smoke, and Mirrors: Volume I. In this outstanding history of bodybuilding and physical culture, Randy showed the diets and nutritional philosophies of the strongest and healthiest from the 1800s and early-to-mid 1900s. This was before modern medicine became what it is now and before marketing and medicating symptoms were what they are now. The early strongmen ate many of the things we eat now and consider Paleo.

For the first time, I became aware of athletes who were capable of moving weights I couldn't have dreamed of in my best training days—and they were doing it long before anabolic steroids, advanced protein shakes and bars, pre-workout drinks and stimulants and all the equipment advances we're told we need to be strong and healthy. Many of these men drank raw cow or goat milk, ate foods straight from the farms they were grown or raised on and practiced a lot of the strange things I encountered in the fringe books I was reading about health and healing. Many of them fasted. They obsessed about food quality. Many avoided grains. Most shunned alcohol. They avoided stress and were obsessive about sleep quality and quantity.

This was the first time I saw the connection between eating for health and eating for strength and performance. I also learned the connection between lifestyle and health or the lack of it. Once I started making these connections, things started to really change and pick up momentum for me. I quit jobs and ended relationships. My friend Chris Martell let me start training clients as a strength coach out of the martial arts school he owned at the time, Modern Self-Defense Center in Middletown, Connecticut. He had a few kettlebells at the school and I started using them. I got hooked. A few months later I was certified as an IKFF Kettlebell Teacher by Steve Cotter and Ken Blackburn. I started training harder and feeling better.

It wasn't too long after this that I found my way to the CrossFit community and taught a kettlebell workshop at a CrossFit gym. I became good friends with the owner, Merle Mckenzie, who encouraged me to get into CrossFit, and I did. Merle and I are friends to this day and I still train at his gyms.

And that's when I came full circle. CrossFitters were eating Paleo and doing it for performance. I started following Robb Wolf's work.

Back in 2005, all my friends and coworkers wanted to know when I would be able to eat normally again. Girlfriends were annoyed and frustrated because there was something wrong with me that kept us from taking day trips to Sturbridge Village to eat fried garbage and ice cream. They wanted to stay out all night and drink in loud clubs while I wanted to be home asleep at 9 p.m.

Today, I'm healthy. I'm happy. I live in the tiny beach cottage in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, that my great-grandfather bought for the family as a summer home. I run at the beach. I feel good. I eat good local foods. I do yoga in the yard in the sun while hummingbirds flit about. I go to bed early, I get up early and I lift heavy things in a little barn behind the house. I still do CrossFit. I blog and write every day. I avoid negative people and places and practices.

There's nothing wrong with me anymore.

In truth, there never was anything wrong with me. But there was, and still is, something wrong with a culture in which health isn't a priority, foods we're told are healthy by experts aren't, disease is rampant, lifestyles are out of control with stress and strife and no one will look at the facts, tell the truth, drop the politics and create change. Misinformation in the diet and health fields is ubiquitous. Almost no one tells the truth. But change is coming, and many established power structures will suffer and disappear as it does.

This book is my contribution to creating change in the way we think about health and diet and the way we eat and live. Some of the things I say may be risky and unpopular. This is a Paleo diet book but, as I'll show you, Paleo is a diverse diet genre. It's not a monolithic approach to follow without question or individualization. I'm here to help you understand Paleo and related approaches in a way that they're not typically presented or explained. I want to empower you to make your own decisions, ask your own questions and find your own answers. I want to make connections and integrate knowledge from different places and different historical periods. I want to help you understand health and diet on a deeper level than it's usually presented.

I had to understand diet, health and lifestyle to heal and live again. I understand it on a very deep level because of the stakes I was playing at. I had to because I couldn't have turned that mess of a life I was living around any other way. Many people still don't get me or my lifestyle or my diet, but that's really okay. I don't care. I'm living my life the way I want to live it and that's what's important.

I'm living life on my own terms.

Adam Farrah

Old Saybrook, Connecticut

Spring 2011

INTRODUCTIONS, RUMINATIONS

AND A LITTLE GUIDANCE

THE PALEO DIETER’S MISSING LINK

As you'll see throughout this book, I like doing things my own way. I also like the modern world, and, as un-Paleo as it may seem, I'm quite enamored with the new, connected world that's rising before our eyes.

The original eBook edition of this book wouldn't have been anywhere near as complete, helpful or successful as it was without the hundreds and hundreds of individual interactions I had with people online while writing it and after it was written. Those interactions and that first edition are the foundation on which this second, traditionally published edition is built.

And, this book might never have found a bricks and mortar publisher and widespread distribution without all the exposure the social web allowed me.

I sold the original Paleo Dieter’s Missing Link primarily as an eBook on my website from 2011 to 2012. Now, in 2013, the book is ready for the major book chains and Amazon. This is truly gratifying and humbling—not to mention exciting as hell and even a bit scary. It's also a testament to the power of the new web and social media in the new economy—the connection economy, as Seth Godin refers to it.

Although this is a book, please don't consider it a close-ended, static entity. I love what I do and I love connecting with others who share a love for the things I'm passionate about: Paleo, health and fitness.

Feel free to use any online platforms to connect with me, share comments or ask for clarification of points in this book. Or feel free to just drop me a message and introduce yourself or tell me what you liked in the book.

My hope is that we'll extend the conversation in this book into the social media space through my blog and platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Since I started blogging and writing, I've been humbled by the fact that anyone would read what I wrote or, even more generously, take the time to share it online or leave a positive comment about what they liked about it or what it meant to them. To think that every view on my blog, every Facebook like and every retweet represents a living, breathing person who took the time to read something I wrote with their limited time—in a sea of information and websites and opinions—is incredible to me. It's humbling, and I'm grateful for it. I work to earn and re-earn that trust and attention every day.

I'm grateful to everyone who reads what I write, and I'm grateful to all my friends and followers online.

Here's where you can find me. I'm looking forward to connecting with you and learning from you.

Blog: practicalpaleolithic.com

Facebook: facebook.com/AdamSFarrah

Twitter: twitter.com/@adamfarrah

Google+: +Adam Farrah

YouTube: adamfarrah.tv

Email: adam@practicalpaleolithic.com

Pinterest: pinterest.com/adamfarrah

A Note About the Links

Through the first edition of this book, I learned a few things about links to resources on the web. Mostly, that they don't always remain valid. Because I wrote this book to be an information- and resource-rich guide, I needed to handle links to resources around the web appropriately so my readers could find what I'm referring them to.

Sometimes URLs change and sometimes authors decide they don't want their content linked to or available publicly anymore. In a PDF book, this is not a major problem. In a printed book, it is.

To deal with this issue and the fluid nature of the web in general, I did the following:

• When linking to my own site or resources I control, I simply give you the URL.

• When I mention others' posts or videos, I give you the author or speaker's name and/or the title of the page or talk so you can Google it yourself and find the current version.

• When it's a general URL, like robbwolf.com, that I'm reasonably sure won't change and doesn't link to a specific location or resource, I give the URL itself.

Because we live in the age of Google, I think it makes more sense to give you the information you need to search for the resource I cite as opposed to a static URL that may or may not be valid when you type it into your browser. My intention was to make life easier for my reader and I hope this method of handling links has done that.

INTRODUCTION: ANOTHER PALEO DIET BOOK?

"Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless,

and add what is specifically your own."

—Bruce Lee

Yeah, another Paleo diet book. This one is different, though. I wrote this book to provide the kind of information I wanted—and needed—when I set out on my long journey toward understanding what a truly healthy and individualized diet was.

There's no shortage of books available on Paleo or any other diet. Some are great. Others—not so much. Virtually every diet book out there, Paleo or otherwise, tells you what to do and what to eat and leaves it at that. In many cases, there's also a lot of theory, rationalization, proof and defense. My assumption here is that you've read at least one or two of the Other Paleo books or you've been around the internet enough to know what's Paleo and what's not, and why Paleo is a good idea from a health and performance standpoint.

I wrote this book as a bridge for you to get from those books and resources to your individualized diet. This book is your missing link.

Here's the thing: Everyone needs a diet that's tuned to their own unique biology, needs, tastes, lifestyle, training and a million other variables. Yes, great maps or blueprints like Paleo can get us 80 or 90 percent of the way there. But the last 10 to 20 percent is where the real magic happens. It also tends to be where most people struggle.

I've designed this book to complement the other great diet resources out there. I talk about some of those influential works and people throughout the book. There is absolutely no shortage of theory, great books and great authors. My purpose here is to create a unique resource that bridges the gap between theory and practice.

By the end of this book, you'll see that a Paleo approach is the way to go for health, healing and performance. But your Paleo will be unique to you and that's what this book will help you to build: your own individualized Paleo diet and lifestyle.

What Are My Credentials?

I have two credentials that are relevant to my writing this book. First, I have a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Connecticut. Because of the education I got at UConn, I was able to approach this entire body of knowledge—diet, health and nutrition—with a scientific attitude and a skeptical, researcher's mindset. I was also able to understand what the hell many authors and theorists were talking about when they got technical. I was also able to tell when they—and there were a few— got all technical and didn't know what the hell they were talking about.

The other important credential I have is years and years of experience working with my own diet and health every single day. I went through a long and very difficult period of poor health, digestive illness and chronic fatigue. There was virtually no help for me in mainstream or alternative medicine—and I spent years with both approaches.

In the end, I was forced to figure it all out for myself and learn how to feed and heal my body on my own. During that time I not only learned what was appropriate for me, I disocvered larger patterns and methods I could use to create a healthy diet for myself. This book is largely about how to develop a healthy diet for you using the methods I used. Your diet won't look the same as mine, but the methods and ideas you use to arrive at an ideal diet will be the same ones I used and that I detail in this book.

The entire body of diet, health and nutrition knowledge is sorely lacking in understanding and direction in practical implementation for the individual. This goes for Paleo and the others out there. There is some great science—formal and empirical observation—when it comes to diet and nutrition, but there isn't enough thought and effort given to individualization. This book is my effort to explain how an individual's diet can vary and how to arrive at a sensible implementation of sound diet and nutrition principles for you.

I don't care about politics or dogma. I don't care about this diet or that diet. I care about what works and what's reasonable to think will build health and performance, and help an individual reach his or her goals. There are always trade-offs, and things don't always fit neatly into nice little boxes.

If you like rigid