After seeing a TED lecture on the topic of 30 day lifestyle challenges presented by a Google engineer, I’ve decided to give it a shot. The idea is that simple changes to your routine can have dramatic effects on your life. The first one that I’ve selected is to not eat bread or rice for one month. My intention and reason for publishing this is twofold:
- to spread the idea of lifestyle experimentation and habit breaking, and
- to record and affirm my commitment to the challenge
The origin of this challenge
My father (a physician) first told me years ago about how the gut has a difficult time digesting grains. Since I’ve recently been training with Brendan twice weekly and cooking a lot of my own meals, I’ve decided to not eat bread for a month to see what effect it has. I started several days ago and already notice that in the morning I’m alert immediately – previously it took me 40 minutes or so to reach that level of awareness.
I’m not sure how difficult it’ll be but it pretty much means that I’ll be mostly cooking my own meals this month since rice is also out of the question. No big deal since I’ve been doing that a lot recently anyway.
The Paleo Solution
My Dad called me at 8am this morning to give me the opportunity to wish him a Happy Fathers day. We had a great conversation about nutrition and he referred me to a book which directly relates to the topic. After hearing his glowing praise, I purchased the book on iPad before he even finished talking about it. The book is titled The Paleo Solution and is authored by a biochemist who’s a world-leading expert on Paleolithic (prehistoric) nutrition. The idea is that modern diet leads to cancer, neurodegeneration, and weakness and is a poor alternative to food sources that predate the agricultural revolution.
Follow up
When the 30 days have run their course, I’ll post the results here. By then I’ll ideally be well onto something else. I already have some other lifestyle changes in mind that I’d like to make but I’ll keep it to one at a time for now so I can keep this experiment as controlled as possible.