About

The evolutionary fitness is about using the sciences of evolutionary biology to give us clues about how to live healthy and happy lives as humans. Many people mistake this movement as one towards romantic primitivism, which would be emulating the lives of hunter-gatherers. While such foragers like the Kitavans might have much to teach us, this movement for me has never been about abandoning modern life and living in the jungle. It's about my heritage as a human being and living as we evolved to live: active, omnivorous, and social. Is it possible to have the good things that our paleolithic ancestors had, specifically immunity from diseases of civilization like IBS, heart disease, GERD, diabetes...and many more... while also enjoying the modern life? I think it is. 

For me this journey started out as an attempt to reclaim my health, but it quickly radiated into other aspects of my life. Through this blog I want to explore how food affects our health, but also what it is to be a human with a mostly-paleolithic body in modernity.

I didn't have to convince myself to do paleo because I was sick and at a loss for what I could do to make my life less painful. Paleo freed me from the antibiotics and medicines that only partially mitigated the illnesses I suffered from. It's possible other diets would have also done the trick, but paleo had something else that appealed to me beyond salvation from illness.

The idea there is a better way to live that is in line with our heritage as a species resonated with me. It's the idea that I am a human and I should live as one. I think there is immense potential for this, not as a petty diet, but as a philosophy which I have just begun to master. Yes, I have the diet down, but I have so much work to do and the world around me looks like a different and perhaps more frightening place.

 I more clearly see the constraints we have put upon ourselves that keep us from living as humans. Considering that, whether or not to eat specific foods seems kind of inconsequential. What I am looking to eat is the forest in my yearning rich with fallow deer, golden yellow chanterelles, grouse nestled in gorse, bright ruby red berries sparkling against a blanket of moss. To nourish my body in wind in the pines beneath the shadows of the clouds.

When I started this blog it was just after losing this world of fertile forests and old cities that I lived in for a year. I had also lost the person I had lived in that world with, as well. But in the West Virginian forest running through those thick green glades, I was reminded that it's all still there, that despite the way I live now, I can perhaps reclaim this human heart- to hunt, to gather, and perhaps, to love.