Jamie Fellrath | Practical Mindfulness

A Smart Baby! Though I'm a bit behind on my podcasts right now (after a marathon listening routine to catch up with Angelo Coppola's Latest in Paleo podcast), I listened to Robb Wolf's Paleo Solution podcast yesterday and came away from it with a couple of little meat gobbets of info that I found interesting from a Paleo mental healthtype standpoint. Robb had the Healthy Skeptic , Chris Kresser, on as a guest, talking about Kresser's new product called the Healthy Baby Code , which is an instructional series on the best ways to take care of yourself if you want to conceive (mostly for women, though some would most certainly be applicable to men), if you're currently pregnant, and how to take care of your baby once the happy day arrives. The two portions of the podcast that I found most interesting from a standpoint of mental development were at 22:30 and 42:42.  The first was where Chris and Robb were discussing proper macronutrient levels for a pregnant ...

[caption id="attachment_190" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Fight the dark side!"] [/caption] As you know from my previous post about Caffeine and Cortisol , I started a 30-Day Coffee fast last Thursday.  And so far, so good. I've been coffee-free since then and I'm feeling pretty good. I was experiencing some minor withdrawal headaches on Thursday and Friday (slightly worse on Friday), but that was nothing to worry about - I didn't even take aspirin for it on Friday, just gutted it out. I had one slip-up when I had a small iced-tea on Sunday, I'm hoping that that was small enough that the effects were negligible.  I wasn't even thinking about it at that point, though, so the withdrawal problems that some were telling me about were limited to the small headaches. I'll take it. At the beginning of this experiment, I was jut a hair under a 34 waist on my pants.  And my sleep, while okay, wasn't super-great.  So t...

No Caffeine for Me! Today, I began upon a 30-day experiment to reduce my cortisol levels by removing coffee from my diet. The goal is to see how it might be affecting my cognitive function and my belly fat. Cortisol is a hormone that is related to stress .  At a very basic level, cortisol is created as a response to stressors in our environment.  Back when we were still chucking spears at deer and chasing down antelope, cortisol was helping to preserve our lives by giving us quick energy by signalling to our livers that it was time to engage in a process known as gluconeogenesis. This process is basically the breakdown of amino acids, the building blocks of protein, into glucose - one of the two monosaccharides (the healthy one) that our bodies use for fuel. Picture this - you're walking across the street, enjoying the day, when suddenly some inattentive driver tries to turn and doesn't see you.  Your heart rate speeds up, and you get a little burst of speed to quickly sp...

Just a short note for now - I did a guest post over at Tony Federico's LiveCaveman - Fitness in an Evolutionary Direction blog, and I hope you'll all go check it out. Tony does a great job of presenting fitness and nutrition in an accessible way and making it fun! He has great passion for the Paleo lifestyle and I hope everyone will check out more of his fine work, and take advantage of his coaching!

Ever since Rachel of PaleoFreedom announced her success with a Paleo diet in treating her daughter Scarlett's autism , it seems like stories about autism and Paleo are coming out of the woodwork.  But one of the most interesting and coincidental articles came to me from Lisa Jo Rudy, the Autism Guide at About.com . Though Ms. Rudy does not mention the Paleo lifestyle or diet per se in her articles for this particular newsletter, it's interesting to note that the entire newsletter is dedicated to the connection between brain function and proper gut health.  Rudy points out a study from McMaster University where researchers looked at the effects of gut bacteria on the behavior of mice, noting that those with lower levels of probiotic bacteria had both behavior changes and reduced levels of a key behavioral-based marker in the brain (as noted in the Newswise article that Rudy used as a reference): Working with healthy adult mice, the researchers showed that disrupting the norm...