Challenge Two

Sustain movement.

This challenge doesn’t just last one week, it lasts the whole year and beyond. It fits in with my aims for the year. Walking my dog recently I mused about his needs beyond the basics of food, shelter, and the chance to toilet. He needs human and canine contact, he needs to run (he’s a sighthound, they need to run), he needs a chance to just explore his environment sometimes. All species and types of animals have needs unique to them. This is an important idea to grasp for anyone who looks after animals (or birds etc). It’s an important concept for parents and for those in business and for people in relationships. Animals and people have their own needs, but we also have common needs.

Exercise has been shown to help with depression. I would suggest that movement is both a physical and a psychological need and yet still far too many of us lead sedentary lives. For months now I have seen little in the way of natural light. I have gone to work in the dark and come home in the dark. My weekends have been short on daylight and even shorter on actual sunlight. Here in the UK we’ve been having a wet winter, so that even when I have free time and its light it’s usually been tipping it down with rain. I haven’t wanted to get out and exercise - I’ve wanted to hibernate.

My challenge this week is to build on what I’ve done already to find ways around this. To fit movement into my inside life in a way that is sustainable. Sustaining and sustainable movement.

What I’ve done so far is to fit some short workouts into my routine. When I went onto anti-depressants nearly a year ago I realised that I could not be rubbish about remembering to take my medication. It had to be tacked into my routine rather than creating something novel. So I started taking my tablets with my morning coffee. I have coffee every morning. I do not forget my pills. I have a history of being rubbish with medication, so this is probably the first medication in my life I have consistently taken for any kind of length of time without messing up.

The short workouts have been tacked onto my shower routine. I do my little routine and then step straight until the shower. I don’t forget my shower so I don’t forget to work out. I walk the dog in the morning, so I get some exercise then anyway, but I am thinking about adding some stretches in for whilst I get dressed.

Whilst it’s been so wet and windy I haven’t had much interest in getting outside during my breaks at work, but I do park away from the building so I have more walking to do at the beginning and end of my day. Ideas for during the working day include things like getting up for a walk around the office at intervals, running up and down the stairs a couple of times during a break, having a standing desk, and doing exercises in your chair.

This post, albeit now nearly 10 months old,  on livingthenorishedlife has been some of the inspiration in building up the activity in my life.

I came across this post about standing desks and I wanted to share it;
http://smarterware.org/7102/how-and-why-i-switched-to-a-standing-desk

But then I also want to share what Mark Sisson had to suggest for those of us who sit at a desk all day; 16 tips for deskjockeys.

I have a handout of some desk exercises but they’re a little awkward to copy out, but here someone has done that for me already.

Sometimes it take a little creativity in order to work out how you can fit more movement into your life, but hopefully you still find some inspiration above.

Your challenge for the week is to get moving and make it part of what you do naturally. Our ancestors did not go to the gym, and there is the suggestion that doing set “exercise” can make us less active outside of those times. If we’re trying to learn the lessons of past, I think when it comes to fitness the lesson isn’t just to get strong or be able to run fast, but to be able to sustain movement. I’ve spent plenty of time camping in the woods and I know that largely people who can’t sustain movement can’t cope well with being in such a primal setting. I know, because usually that’s been me and I want that to change.

Challenge One

Challenge One

Paleo/primal is not one size fits all. The ancestors and modern people who we look to includes a wide variety. We are diverse, and we want different things out of life. From what I’ve seen people start a paleo diet with a goal in mind, such as weight loss, being able to perform better in some physical activity, improvement to markers relating to cardio-vascular disease, to help with such and such that is related to digestion. What is eaten is tailored to that goal, and that is one of the neat things about Paleo but there is no need to limit it to tweaking diet and exercise alone.

Although I stated in the first post that I hope we’re all healthier by the end of this in this challenge I am asking what this means to you and what you hope to gain?

Personally I am planning on:

1. Stablising my moods and being able to have “normal” mental health without the help of anti-depressants. This won’t just be as a result of these challenges, I’ve got other stuff that is going to help tip the balances in my favour. I want to work out ways to deal with the bad days better, and have them fewer and further between.
2. Gaining new experiences and learning more about ancestral health.
3. Become fitter, stronger and leaner.

Go on, work some out for yourself. Don’t make a huge long list, keep it simple but they can be a bit pie in the sky. Make them vaguely realistic but something that’s going to take some work. These are not resolutions, they are plans. Once you have them we’re going to look at breaking them down to make them achievable using mine as examples.

1. I am going to tighten up on my diet. Basically I’m going to stay paleo. I’m also going to experiment with various elements to try and find ways to both raise the bar on my mental health and to find ways to deal with the bad days. Selfishly some of those elements are going to end up as challenges but stress/bad mental health holds many of us back from true health. IIf mental health is an issue for you - do you know WHY you’re feeling like this? I do know, and I am addressing my issue with many life changes. You need to know the cause if you’re going to address it. One step at a time but your priority should be to work out your cause and then work out how you’re going to address it, and then address it, making changes as necessary. If this is too much of a challenge alone, it’s perhaps time to seek help from a professional.
2. I am going to do this by weekly coming up with a new challenge and doing the research that goes into it.
3. I am going to exercise regularly, focusing on lifting heavy stuff and generally moving more. Couple with a paleo diet this should cause me to become fitter, stronger and leaner. Sounds so simple on paper/screen.

Just like eating paleo - no one is going to tell you off if you fall off the living paleo wagon, but it is your responsibility to pick yourself up and get back on with us.

Please either write your goals down and save the piece of paper in a safe place or write it on the computer and save the file. You want to regularly review to see if you’re still on track. And if you’re not on track then ask yourself why and what you need to do to get there. I hope people reading this will share your goals in the comments. 

More active challenge coming next week. 

Let's start at the beginning.

So you’re here because you want to either join in with some paleo challenges, or laugh at me whilst I undertake them?

Originally inspired by this post by Primal Toad [http://www.primaltoad.com/primal43/], I wanted to come up with challenges that would help keep me on track, develop my sense of what it is to be paleo/primal, and hopefully fill any ancestral health gaps that weren’t going to be filled by good food, good sleep and good exercise.

I graduation from university with a BA Hons in archaeology and an MA in experimental archaeology. I’m not an expert on hunter-gatherer lives but I’m used to messing about with replicating stuff in the name of science, along with researching about the past. I’m also pretty certain I sat through whole lectures about how spiffy fat is and how important they were/are to hunter/gathers (along with poking fires with sticks, bashing rocks together and messing about in the dirty).

I will try and provide a full 52 challenges, but there won’t necessarily be one for every week. Many of the challenges will require (hopefully) minimal equipment and limited planning, but where I do plan on a challenge that requires a bit more, I will try and give you some warning. You don’t have to do any of the challenges at the same time as me (although that would be fun) but if you do I would like to hear how you get on. I’ve tried to think outside the box, but there is a focus on things that help improve mental health. I get the impression that this is something that many of us need to work on. I certainly don’t claim to be an expert there, but currently my own mental health is holding back by physical health.

I hope we’re all healthier by the time we get to the end of the next 52 weeks . . .