Jamie Fellrath | Practical Mindfulness

I've been struggling of late to fit in time for everything I enjoy doing, and listening to my podcasts is among those things.  And due to the time involved in it, Robb Wolf's The Paleo Solution Podcast  frequently gets put off.  Robb's a bit wordy sometimes. But as I've been getting caught up, one of the big pleasures was listening to episode 95 of the podcast, where Robb interviews Dr. William Davis.  Dr. Davis has just released a new book, entitled Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health .  With a title like that, you can bet what it's going to be about - Dr. Davis asserts that wheat, and particularly changes in the actual wheat plant during the population-crisis-scare of thirty years ago, are responsible for the obesity crisis in the US and increasingly around the world today. But what's truly interesting about the discussion is the number of other effects that wheat has on the population, including (probably not surpr...

Walking properly is key to painless feet. It's amazing how a simple thing like walking painlessly can make you rethink what you've learned about your own body. Here's the situation. I'm a big obstacle race fan.   Warrior Dash , Ruckus , etc... love that stuff.  I like to push my whole body and have fun when I race and get exercise.  I'll never be a fan of marathons or distance cycling or triathlons or anything like that, but give me a three-four mile race with a bunch of stuff to climb over, wade through, swim on, etc. and I'm happy as a clam. And I also love my Vibram Fivefingers and VivoBarefoot shoes.  They're comfortable, I get that foot massage that comes from just walking on uneven terrain, and they let me feel a little more in control of where I am. But... the Vibrams and my love of obstacle races sort of came to a head recently.  I'd been having some achilles tendinitis in my heels but nothing that I was really worried about, ever since running...

There's an annoying trend going on in regards to the public image that the Paleo lifestyle is receiving recently, and the primary location of it today is the Discovery Health article " 10 Diets That Just Don't Work ." That's right, you guessed it:  numero uno was our beloved (and totally effective) Paleo Diet. This entire article appears to be the opinion of one Kip Hardy, a registered dietician at Emory Healthcare in Atlanta (the title of "registered dietician" should make the hackles stand up on most Paleo devotees right away, naturally). It's no secret that dieticians don't care for Paleo.  They listed Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint Cookbook as one of the "most irresponsible" cookbooks of 2010, for example, and they frequently take uninformed potshots at Loren Cordain and Wolf and their ilk.  So I suppose it's not a surprise. Let's take this apart a bit.  One of the criteria statements made here is as follows: We realize...

Always pay attention to what's going on around you, because you don't know where it's going to take you. A couple weeks ago, my sister and her little boy were in town, so they, my brother and his son, and my wife and two kids and I went to our local award-winning science museum, COSI .  Obviously, the goal was just to go and enjoy each other's company and let the kids all have some fun together. Well, mission accomplished.  COSI was its usual fun, interesting place.  The kids all had a ball. But that's not what this story is about.  Here's what it is about:  Steampunk. That's right, if you're a sci-fi fan you may have heard about this genre/subculture.  Steampunk is all about "history as it never was," and revolves around the sort of science fiction that Jules Verne and the like wrote about - sort of an industrial-revolution-timeframe look at what might have been had we developed steam-powered technology more than gas, diesel, electri...