Hey folks. It has been a while since I have updated the site so apologies. We are still very much Paleo and still dip in and out of the Autoimmune Protocol. After getting back on the autoimmune horse after a while I realised how much we had come to rely on eggs and a few other foods that were not 100% legit.

We have had a somewhat tumultuous year as well. We had the death of a close family member after an accident that was tough on my wife. I also run a digital marketing company in Birmingham (UK) called Bowler Hat and that is growing but with family issues the stress of a growing business is not always helpful. My wife also runs an audio and video conversion service so balancing the life, stress, grief and work has been a challenge this last twelve months.

Paleo has been good to us but after the last year some MS symptoms had started to creep back in and we felt it was time to tighten up our Paleo belts and eliminate some foods we felt may not be helping. What this means in practice for us is the removal of eggs, chocolate (nnnoooo!!), nuts, nut flours and peppers. We had loosened up enough to have the odd Thai take away but again that has had to go.

Elimination Diet

I often see various diets criticised for one reason or another. Vegan, Paleo, SCD, GAPS, Ketogenic, Low Carb – it seems no one diet is optimal all the time and this is completely correct. Certain diets should almost be viewed as tools to be used for specific situations and even Paleo is really a template that needs to be customised for the individual. It is possible to be a vegetarian and only eat highly processed white bread and chocolate bars and that is certainly not good for you so we must be sensible and move beyond these simple labels.

For us the basic Paleo template provides a good starting point: no grains, no legumes, no vegetable oils, healthy meat, good fats, tons of fish and a truckload of varied fruit and vegetables.

For those of us that have to go a step further to ease autoimmune conditions the elimination of nightshades, nuts and eggs takes many of the Paleo staples off the table. We have found through a process of elimination that Emma must also avoid coffee and dark chocolate. Not cool but not a lot we can do. We took it out for a while, brought them back in and an instant hike in symptoms. We just have to get over that and move forwards.

Supplements

Supplements are another one of those things that tend to polarise people but I have a fairly practical mentality with regards to supplements. Firstly, I would rather get everything we need from food. Omega 3 being the obvious example and we try to have sardines and mackerel for lunch most days. These tins of sardines in olive or brine go well with a salad for lunch. Job done. We do take multivitamins now and again but not all the time and we supplement Vitamin D and Probiotics. On the probiotic front I try to vary them and we use Bio Kult, AOR Probiotic 3, Primal Defence, Primal Defence Ultra and Prescript Assist. These should cover off the organisms we are sadly lacking and then we compliment that with home made fermented vegetables.

Our Approach

I briefly touched on labels and I do tend to call this an autoimmune Paleo approach but it is really a mish mash of lots of things. We look at the Wahls Paleo diet and Dr. Perlmutter diets for nutrient guidelines to support the brain and mitochondrial function. We try and be ketogenic every now and again and eat a lot of good fats and coconut oil. We eliminate typical problem foods (nuts, nightshades etc) beyond the usual Paleo guidelines but we also experiment with other foods that we suspect are problematic. It is very personalised as I believe it has to be to work.

Going green

We also have a daily green smoothie. In reality this happens about three times a week but I mean for it to be daily. In this we have frozen berries, nutritional yeast for B vitamins, kelp + spirulina for iodine and amino acids. This is then fleshed out whatever fruit and greens I have to hand: kale, spinach, lettuce etc. Some kind of fat for good measure as well with usually coconut cream or avocado filling that gap. This is very much inspired by the Wahls protocol smoothies with the goal of brain health and filling in a few common nutritional gaps.

Progress

So we are back at it. We have been for about three weeks now and Emma is already seeing improvements. Less fatigue. One specific bit of numbness and weakness is improving. Emma still runs around 5 miles most days to put this in perspective but this one bit of numbness is a good marker. When we clean up that gets better.

More to come

I am going to log our progress here over the next few months and intend to keep doing so. In part to share our experience in that it may help others and in part as an exercise to help me journal everything. I have some great UK style autoimmune recipes I have been working on with last nights battered prawns being the first up in the next few days.

As ever if we can help drop a comment.

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Hey folks, this week we have a guest post from Karen Maidment who is running UK Paleo and Primal cookery workshops. So, if you guys want to get some help making the switch to Primal or Paleo then Karen is the lady to help you get there. 

It’s a Paleo, Primal Thing

Paleo and Primal are two styles of eating that basically mean; Food as Mother Nature Intended! In my Meals That Heal cook book and cookery workshops all our recipes are naturally grain, dairy, soy, nut, seed and processed sugar free. Why? Because these foods are often challenging for the digestive system to breakdown and use, and can create mass inflammation in the body, meaning pain, weight gain, mood swings, low sex drive and disease processes.

Now excluding these foods doesn’t mean a hungry tummy or a boring repertoire of meals. It simply means getting creative and back in tune with the best of Mother Nature’s ingredients.

Following a Paleo or Primal style of eating simply means:

• Enjoying fresh seasonal veggies

• Sourcing organic wild meats, poultry and fish

• Utilising saturated animal fats, coconut oil and organic oils

Put them all together in beautiful, lovingly combined recipes and viola you have a Paleo / Primal diet.

Take this quick easy no grain bread recipe for instance; these flat breads are awesome slathered with organic ghee and raw honey or piled high with my Liver Loathers Pate (Meals That Heal recipe) and seasonal salad leaves. You can even use as an accompaniment to a home cooked curry or a dairy free pizza!

Sweet Potato Flat Bread Recipe

Ingredients make 2

• 1 egg
• 2T organic coconut flour, sifted
• 3T organic sweet potato, cooked and mashed
• ½ t organic gluten free baking powder
• ½ t sea salt

1. Preheat your oven to 170°C

2. Place all of your ingredients except the flour into a bowl and whisk using an electric whisk until smooth.

3. Sift the coconut flour in and whisk again.

4. Line a baking tray with parchment paper and divide the mixture into 2 even sized portions, spread out thinly using the back of a spoon into rounds about a ¼ inch think.

5. Pop into the oven and bake for 12-15 minutes, then carefully flip over and bake for 5 more minutes. Your flatbreads should be cooked through and crispy but not like cardboard!

6. Cool completely before using.

Recipe by Karen Maidment author of Meals That Heal, founder of EndIBSNaturally.com

If you want to learn to cook Paleo, Primal foods without the stress, come and join me on one of my forthcoming Meals That Heal Cookery Workshops or grab a copy of my cook book. (Details on both can be found via www.purebodybalanceshop.co.uk )

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If you have spent any time at all in the Paleo / Primal ecosystem you have likely come across the term Chronic Cardio along with a general dislike of everything cardio. Whether it is Robb Wolf, Mark Sisson or another one of the Paleo stalwarts it would seem the dislike of cardio is well established.

This is seemingly with good reason as too much cardio does not fit into the health and longevity bias that we all have in the ancestral health movement. But, this poses the question: what if you like running, swimming, biking or some other cardio heavy sport? Is it possible to enjoy your sport without negative health implications?

Running yourself into an early grave?

The science is pretty clear on this and pushing yourself for over an hour at a time is not doing you any favours. Sustained bouts of cardio at 60 minutes plus where your heart rate is at 80% or more will increase inflammation in the body, mess with the immune system, raise cortisol (which messes with your sleep, hence recovery), increase oxidation in the body (not good if you’re eating bad fats or even too much omega 3) and it will even prevent the body taking energy from fat!

Running yourself fit or running yourself fat?

Run, Walk and Lift

If your focus is purely health and fitness and you have no specific training goals then exercise really can be pretty simple: run, walk and do some kind of strength work.

You need to to do plenty of really low intensity stuff like walking so walk the dog, walk to work, take the stairs, walk to the shops, get of the bus a stop earlier, go for a walk at lunch time – whatever you do just walk and try to get 30 mins or so in a day.

You also need to stay strong and do some age and fitness level appropriate strength work. Whether that is a simple bodyweight workout, some weight machines at your local gym or ideally a structured lifting program like Starting Strength just do it two to three times a week and be consistent.

Beyond that, you will want some high intensity work to really get your heart pumping but the great thing is, this needs to be a short, sharp shock rather than any painful, sustained process. Think doing some sprints in a tabata protocol (4 mins total – 20 second sprint, 10 second total rest x 8).If you want to really push things take this up to around 12 minutes with three individual tabata sprints with a 60 second rest between sets – but remember the magic dose here is around the 12 minute mark so don’t overdo it!

But, what if you like to run?

This clever exercise thing is all fine and dandy but what if you like to run? I like to run. My wife likes to run. Before the spectre of Multiple Sclerosis entered our lives and we dived into the Paleo / Primal / Ancestral Health Movement we were training for the Edinburgh Marathon (which we completed). As it goes, 4 years later and being in better health than ever (no drugs) my wife is now training to do the London Marathon for an MS Charity so it’s safe to say, she really likes to run.

So, what to do? Obviously, having an autoimmune disease and the increased oxidative damage, inflammation and everything else which goes with this is not good. I originally set out with the idea of looking at using HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) and approaches like Crossfit Endurance (CFE) to train with less total time spent running  (hence inflamed . The goal was to try and find a way to devise a training plan that utilised short bouts of high intensity exercise to cut down on the overall time spent exercising. I dug into Crossfit Endurance thinking that was the answer but it seems to require a really solid grounding in Crossfit and really, neither of us have that so as time went on, we ended up following a traditional training program.

Crossfit itself is also not without problems and whilst these brutal metcons (metabolic conditioning) have benefits, there are many voices now talking on the problems with the ‘sport of fitness’. The general gist seems to be how the focus on doing things for time, the lack correct form for many exercises and pushing yourself so hard for 30 minutes (remember that 12 minute sweet spot I mentioned earlier) is just not helping and we are back in the same problem zone as Chronic Cardio (ChronicMetCon?).

Racing without running

So, I figure, I like two things about running most

1. I like to get out to nature and my runs were always in the park – I miss that
2. I enjoy the events themselves

Well, the first one can easily be traded for walks with my family, no problem but replacing the actual events themselves is not so easy. I enjoy the community aspect of the events and whilst I am not trying to compete, I do enjoy taking part and that is somewhat lacking from my time spent in my dingy gym lifting heavy weights.

So, I figure I need to go back to the drawing board and try to produce a program that is inspired by HIIT & Crossfit Endurance yet does not have such strict requirements. A program that allows me to train for a short cardio event like a 10k but without having to spend hours pounding the street. I also have to test this on myself first as my wife is in the last six weeks of a marathon program so it needs to work kind of fast.

In simple terms we this is an attempt at designing some kind of High Intensity Interval Cardio Training (HIICT – not as catchy as HIIT but it will have to do) that can be used to train for events.

Smart Cardio

So, looking at Crossfit endurance it would seem you do the main site Crossfit WODs and the Crossfit endurance workouts that are specific to your sport.

The explanation from the CFE site is that an athlete will perform around six workouts per week with two of these being sport specific. We are only concerned with running here so we will work on say three running workouts to supplement an existing strength program (3 times weekly).

• 1 x short intervals (100m – 200m)
• 1 x medium to long intervals (200m – 800m)
• 1 x sprints / hill runs (alternate weeks)

As best as I can tell from the CFE site this template applies to everything from a 5k to a 100 km ultramarathon so there is some flexibility in the durations of the short and long intervals.

So, I also do a Starting Strength style linear progression weightlifting program that is getting kind of challenging now three times a week so this has to fit around that. This also replaces the standard Crossfit workouts for me in the template with something a little more measured and goal orientated (which is not kicking my ass so much).

10k Training Plan

To test this out I have signed up for a local cross country. It is a fairly tough race, 10k, hilly as hell and populated with lots of the cardio crowd. It is a run I have never managed to break 50 minutes on even when I trained a fair bit of cardio (albeit, never for speed). Recently I have done little to no running, maybe once a week for 3 miles max and many weeks I have not got out at all. I do get the odd tabata in although it is mainly on the punchbag so I have no kind of great base that will skew the results. That said, I do eat and sleep a whole lot better so… swings and roundabouts but certainly, I have not been doing any running.

Most people, myself included have no easy way to gauge distance so rather than doing based on time rather than distance. You can pick up a simple interval timer piece of software for your smartphone and I really like one called Impetus which you can get for Apple and Android. Alternatively, you can pick up a cheap interval timer online.

I have three weeks as of writing this so my plan is as follows:

Week 1

Week 2

Week 3

The road ahead

So, I have a plan, that is somewhat inspired by the running part of Crossfit endurance. I have tweaked it a little to be time rather than distance specified for now to make it more accessible for people.

I have not done this run for two years and have done little actual running in that time period so if I can come close to, or even beat my previous record of just over 50 minutes I will be pretty damn pleased with myself.

I also have  a very short amount of time to train so the four workouts + a tabata (4 mins) each week may be a bit much, but time will tell if we can further simplify this without adding further Crossfit style metcons as simplicity is our goal here.

Going further

I will follow up this post in three weeks with my experience here and to see if this is worthy of further experimentation. This is very much a beginner template for shorter distance but should things go to plan I have a 16km run in a few months and a 21km one before the end of the year so I will test this approach out with a 4 week plan for the 16km and a four week plan for the 21km.

Also, back in my crazy, pre paleo, running days I made apromise to wife, father and partner in crime on this site that we would run the New York Marathon in 2015 – if this goes to plan, I would certainly like to develop a plan and leading-up-to -the-plan plan that we could use to train for that event without beating ourselves up to much. I will be pushing 40 as will my wife and my father will be 65 so we could certainly all do without the chronic cardio so… watch this space.

Questions & Feedback?

I am no expert on Crossfit programming so would appreciate any feedback and if you have any questions, fire way. I will update this with my training log as well as I get stuck in.

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There is a tendency amongst folks, be that scientists, fitness people or just your everyday folks like you and me to find a single solution to a given problem and fat loss and body composition fall firmly into that category.

Some will tell us it is too many calories, too many carbs, not enough activity, not enough exercise – but what is the reality?

Can we hang all of our big, fat modern ills on one of these evils or is the reality, in this instance, a little more complex? Can we devise a single kind of food to avoid, exercise or even pill to take that will solve our problems once and for all?

Darkness and Sleep

In the book Lights Out the authors present the idea that when we don’t sleep in synch with seasonal light exposure (that is more in winter, less in summer) we end up out of sync with our environment and stuck in virtual summer and this is a bad thing. In summer our bodies are anticipating the coming winter and scarcity of food supply and we therefore crave carbs and calories to build up a good padding of body fat to help keep us warm and sustain us through months of scarce food, darkness and inactivity. The problem is, since we lit up the world with electricity and lightbulbs we are telling our bodies it is always summer and we never enter a period of short days, limited light exposure and most important scarcity.

Good Calories, Bad Calories, Too Many Calories

In Good Calories Bad Calories Gary Taubes looks at the current dogma that fat is bad, carbohydrates are good and to be healthy we just need to exercise more and effectively dismisses these claims. Things were already problematic before the low fat, high carb advice was pushed on us but since then, despite eating less fat and more carbs than ever before, obesity and diabetes are killing us in some scary numbers and we now have an epidemic of obese six year olds! The book goes on to argue how it is the wrong kind of calories and not so much the number that is causing us the problems and the sugars and refined carbohydrates that are at the root of our problems.

Marathon Man

Alternatively, it could be that we just don’t do as much as we used to and we are a nation (globe) of people sitting around on our big, padded bottoms eating boxes of sugary donuts and swilling it down with high sugar drinks. Or, on the flipside, we do too much exercise, we run marathons and pound treadmills and fuel all of this with yet more sugar.

Stressed Eric

Could it all be down to the stress of our modern lives? Working too long, for too little. Not enough time with the family. Too much pressure for too long. Do we ever get to unwind? Mortgages  kids, recessions, property booms, dot com busts – it’s a pretty nasty world out there and these stresses are constant factors running day in and day out. Compare this to what we know about our ancestors and modern hunter gatherer lifestyles – they had it both tougher and easier than we do. They had stress, for sure, I imagine hunting and killing your food could be pretty hairy, but at the same time, they had a whole lot of leisure time so their punctuated high stress periods are not well aligned with the constant, insidious pressures that we face (Robb Wolf covers this really well in the Cortisol chapter in the Paleo Solution book).

If you can’t take the heat…

We really do have things pretty nice recently and 90% of homes in the UK have central heating and there are not many of us who work outside and when we do, we have some fancy schmancy modern togs to keep us fully insulated (and we probably have some evolutionary fat padding under those new fangled clothes to round things (us) out).

In essence, we don’t really get cold any longer for any extended period of time so it’s no surprise that we now have a bunch of folks who are claiming that cold exposure is the fat loss secret we have been missing all along – could it be that simple? Get a bit cold and burn off some more calories?

Wheat, meat and sowing the seed (soils)

Of course, we could not look at what is making us fat, or at least ill, without considering wheat and seed oils. Seed oils in particular are a relatively new menace only introduced into our diet in the mid 1900’s and as our consumption of these oils increased, and saturated fat consumption decreased, heart disease was soaring – now, you don’t have to a rocket scientist to see the obvious problem with the recommendation to replace saturated fat with seed oils here. Oh and wheat, modern wheat at least – if you are working towards diabetes, heart disease, celiac, rheumatoid arthritis or even dementia then this modern, genetically modified monster is a friend else…

The Melting Pot

So, with so many potential issues, so many things that may be making us fat, which one of these delightful candidates fits (fats) the bill? Well, in my mind, there is no single issue, all of these issues contribute to our problems and the best way to review this is to look at our recent and not so recent history, use that evolutionary perspective and look at just when things started to go wrong and just what the changes in our environment where at that time.

There are some great statistics early on in Lights Out that detail how in 1910 the average adult got around 9 to 10 hours of sleep a night but now the average adult is lucky to get more than seven hours a night. That’s around 700 to 1000 hours of lost sleep a year and it would seem that sleep loss is a cumulative problem – miss an hour seven nights in a row and you may as well have just missed an entire night.

We also work more, relax and socialise less, exercise (badly) more and consume a whole lot more entertainment through our TV’s, computers and smart phones. And, it would seem, we are getting ill. We are at least getting fat, and illness and fatness are best buddies don’t ya’ know?

Eureka Moment

We don’t have one single problem here, we have many, many interconnected problems that all revolve around our modern world and the many stresses we have introduced. All of our ‘science’ and advice has got us nowhere, literally, as many of us are now too fat to really do much (or soon will be).

Lights Out talks about how we are designed to roll with the seasons and feast and frolic in the summer whilst the light allows and fast, famine and sleep a whole bunch more in the winter whilst there is little in the way of carbohydrates to sustain us. We should fatten up some during summer, but only for around five months a year and then we sleep when it gets cold and dark earlier.

If we look at the last 100 years or so then we have a pretty solid timeline:

1920 we lit the world up with the lightbulb (light), we started living in better and more well constructed houses (heat), we consume ever more and more sugar, more processed foods, better light bulbs, we got busier, worked more, had less leisure time. In the 1950’s we were told that saturated fat made us fat and ill so we started eating more seed oils and more, low fat processed food, and we got fatter and more ill than ever before. We now work even harder and in the last 15 years we have moved to a 24/7 environment where any day, at any time, a sugary, high calorie processed snack, served in a warm, well lit venue is only a short drive away. We drive everywhere, we eat rubbish, we are bathed in near constant light, we have no respect for the  seasons, we don’t get enough sleep and we keep ourselves warm all the time – no wonder we are broken.

In a book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers the Author makes the point that wild animals do not suffer from the stress related illnesses that plague modern humans. Likewise, in Lights Out the point is made that in nature, no animals get cancer. But some animals get cancer – the ones that live with us, that bath in our artifical light and eat the processed foods we give them.

The Evolutionary Template

So, the opening of this article looks at how we try to simplify things, and often, that should be the right way to arrive at a solid, uncomplicated answer that is based on few, if any assumptions but when it comes to finding a single problem driving our health and weight issues then we can’t hang our hat on any one issue be that wheat, meat, sleep, sugar, stress or exercise. But, we can look backwards, we can devise a simple answer to this problem and that is to simplify our lives and live in a way that our genes were designed for:

• Turn the lights off earlier and try to roll with the seasons a little more &
• Get more sleep, ideally 9 hours a night and in a pitch black room
• Eat real food – organic, seasonal fruit and veg + wild caught fish and grass fed animals
• Get more low intensity exercise – think walking the dog and hiking
• Get outside more, even when it is cold!
• Get more sunlight and don’t slaver yourself in sun block at every opportunity – we need some sun!
• Do some strength based exercise along with some high intensity interval work but don’t go crazy
• Manage stress – meditate, do some yoga, go to the park, whatever, just get some downtime
• Work less – put yourself first, examine your life and look for ways to do less

Ultimately, try to look backwards and live a more natural life that would imitate the lives of our modern and not so modern ancestors. Sleep, less artificial lights, real food, family, friends, get off Facebook  get off this Blog, go and light a fire, cuddle up next to your wife and kids and tell a story – evolution sculpted us to put on weight, it also built us to lose it again when the time was right so live more naturally and you will be fitter, leaner and your health will thank you for it.

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Whilst the basic Paleo diet has some good simple rules at it’s core when you dig deeper and start to personalise the diet to suit your individual needs then things can become a little complicated. Whether you are looking to do an elimination diet to test for problems that may be contributing to a leaky gut and impacting an autoimmune disease or whether you just want to reintroduce some other more Primal style foods like good quality dairy then there is one other aspect that is oft overlooked – food quality.

What is Food Quality?

Right here, this is where it gets complicated and this is where the simple black and white of no grains, legumes or dairy falls flat on it’s lean, muscular paleo behind. Food quality is where we find that even within individual foods items and types there are many different shades of quality – some going from awful to okay to great.

Lets take milk for example. Now, milk does not suit me or my wife but if you tollerate it and can find a good source of high quality milk then it may be something you can reintroduce. But, just what constitutes quality when we are talking about milk? What makes some milks bad, others okay and others pretty impressive if you can tollerate them?

A Qualitative Assessment of Dairy Products

Milk, in it’s raw and natural form is loaded with good bacteria, probiotics and lots of healthy fats. Unfortunately, by the time it hits your table it has been pasteurised to extend shelf life which kills all the bacteria. These bacteria also do another job which is to produce lactase which helps digest lactose which is one common problem people have with milk. It has probably also had the quality fat removed or some of it at least and is likely stored in plastic bottles. It does not stop there though and the milk you may be giving to your children probably comes from grain fed cattle which is far, far from their natural diet of grass and subsequently has an impact on the quality of the milk itself.

At the other end of the spectrum we have full fat raw milk – a healthy (for those that can tollerate it), high fat product loaded with beneficial gut bacteria.

Good? Bad? Don’t know?

Well, obviously, we start with the golden rules of Paleo which is to go grain, legumes and dairy free and we do this for at least a month. If you are just starting out it makes sense to make this a low carb affair and stick with just lean meats, vegetables and healthy fats (extra virgin olive oil, fat from grass fed meat & virgin organic coconut oil). If you have a leaky gut or an autoimmune issue you should look to modify things further and remove nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and any derivatives like chilli spices) along with nuts, seeds and eggs.

Then, when you have got this all dialled in for a few months, we can start to look at the quality of the food we eat. Can you tollerate butter? Yeah? Great, but make sure it is organic and from grass fed animals (check out Yeo Valley products in the UK). Are you eating lean cuts of supermarket meat? Well, can you afford any truly organic grass fed meat? Cheaper cuts maybe? Well, work them in as well.

Are you eating fish? Supermarket salmon is all farmed and is not the best but supermarket frozen salmon is usually half the price and is wild caught so has less overall fat and more of the good fats due to it’s natural diet (and did not live in some awful infested pit with about a million other salmon and all their byproducts (poop).

Like eggs? Are your eggs from grain fed battery hens or from true organic, free range animals that are free to eat a more natural diet and possibly supplemented to increase the omega 3 content of the eggs?

Believe it or not, the health of the animal that either made or became your food has a huge bearing on the health of the food itself and all these foods can be unhealthy and healthy all depending on the status of the animal itself before it gave up or became your food.

Optimise your food

Chances are you could make improvements across the board and fortunately, to simplify this process, for UK folks at least there is a great site called Natural Food Finder. This site has a list of all of the different grades of foods in a given category, check out the dairy page for starters and that has an avoid, average, good and best category for all products along with actual brands and suppliers so you can use this as real actionable information to improve your shopping.

The site is not paleo, so use with caution but the information it does have on meat, dairy and even fermented foods along with what you can get and where you can get it from is invaluable. They even have maps for local organic farms so you can see what is available in your local area and pop down to the local farm shop and see what it is you will be getting.

http://www.naturalfoodfinder.co.uk/

So, take a look, would love to hear your thoughts and let me know how you get on in the comments and if you know anyone who probably is not eating as well as they could or who would benefit from this information, please share the article and if you can click the big red Google+1 button it gets us some love from Google and helps us get the word out.

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It’s always the things you never thought about that trip you up in life and it was that way for us with our first bash at the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol. We were already pretty rigid Paleo but we did eat a lot of nuts, seeds, tomatoes, peppers and aubergines. Most worrying was the amount of omega 6 from all the nuts (and nut flour for Paleo friendly baking) but it was not till we tried to cut all of these foods out that we realised just how prominent they were in our diet.

Still, we got around that by focusing on all the autoimmune protocol friendly foods that we could eat and looked upon it as a way to jazz up our diet rather than pining for all the foods that we had to give up, for 30 days at least. We worked in a bunch of new vegetables and cooked things in different ways along with a load of fermented foods so generally, whilst it was a tough process, it was a worthwhile one.

Anyhow, like I said, things were going well, or so I thought, till I casually glanced at the ingredients of one of my spice mixes and noticed it had chilli in it. So, I started to look at them all and sure enough: chill, paprika, cayenne. Damn, three weeks in and we had been eating chilli powder all along. Well, no wonder my psoriasis had not improved as much as I had hoped. Oh well, back to the drawing board!

So, if you are working hard to heal your leaky gut for the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol or for any other Leaky Gut protocol then you need to ditch chilli, for a while at least and that can mean food gets kind of boring if your a spice fiend like myself. So, these spices are all 100% chilli free so enjoy.

Autoimmune Friendly Spices

Now, you can buy some of these in the shops but this has to come with the caveat that you will need to read the packet to make sure there is no chili (cayene /paprika / pimento) but these are some spice mixes I have made up ourself and that work really well without any kind of chilli pepper or tomato so please feel free to have a go yourself. Also, I am toying with making these up and offering them for sale on the blog, I guess they would be about £2.00 each with free postage so drop a comment if your interested and I can figure out getting some larger batches done.

Garam Masala

Ingredients listed in order of volume. I do it by taste so exact measures are not exactly providedl

• Coriander
• Cumin
• Pepper
• Salt
• Nutmeg
• Fenugreek
• Cloves
• Aniseed
• Cinnamon
• Cardamom

This is kind of sweet and mixes well with honey and oil to give you an Indian tasting rub but without any chilli messing up your day.

Chinese Five Spice

This is great one for Chinese cooking, stir frys and the like and has a kind of sweet aniseed taste.

• Black Pepper
• Aniseed
• Cinnamon
• Cloves

Indonesian Spice Blend

This one works well with curried dishes, soups or just as a spice for meat – let me know if you figure out any other uses.

• Coriander
• Ginger
• Caraway
• Black Pepper
• Cinnamon
• Nutmeg
• Garlic Powder
• Cardamom
• Clove
• Mace

Seasoned Salt

This is a simple one for use on meat or in stir fries, it works well mixed with oil and just rubbed on chicken breast before you nuke it or on steaks.

• Sea Salt
• Coriander
• Black Pepper
• Bay Powder
• Basil
• Cloves

Lemon Pepper

This is the little sister of Seasoned Salt above and again is just a flexible friend for adding some flavour to your dishes.

• Coarse Black Pepper
• Lemon Peel

Mustard Powder

Finally, if you like a bit of heat whilst chilli is off the menu then Mustard Powder can give you that fix. Really, it is just yellow mustard seeds ground up so no need for a recipe but damn, it’s pretty tasty and mixes well with oil and a bit of salt to flavour meat before grilling.

Autoimmune Friendly Herbs & Spices

Wan’t some good news for a change? Pretty much all herbs are autoimmune safe if you tolerate them so if you are were used to a lot of flavour and that mostly came from spices, you can really shift the balance towards herbs and have nothing to worry about. The following are a few mixes we have experimented with but here you can with pretty much anything, just be sure to check the label and make sure there are no nasties!

Italian Garlic Seasoning

This is useful when you want a bit of an Italian flavour and works well with fish and meat. It will also work in grass fed mince and is even better if you tolerate tomatoes after your 30 days and can use it in a bolognese type sauce with some courgette or sweet potato strips made as a pasta replacement!

• Garlic Granules
• Oregano
• Parsley

Italian Seasoning

This is another italian one (can you tell we used to eat a lot of pasta before the paleo ship came in?). Pretty flexible, works well with meat and fish.

• Oregano
• Garlic Granules
• Basil
• Marjoram

Onion, Chive & Parsley Salt

Again, this works well with fish and I have not tried it with any meat yet but mixed with some oil it flavoured up some cod fillets amazingly ( and lets be honest, they need it).

• Onion Powder
• Chive
• Parsley
• Fine Rock Salt

What are you using?

I would love to hear any experiences from other folks on the Paleo autoimmune protocol and to know what you are using to spice up your meals. Food is just too important a part of my day to just have bland flavours so anything that is working for you, drop a comment and I will give it a go!

On a side note, I hear that the new Practical Paleo book from the ever wonderful Balanced Bites has a bunch of Autoimmune Friendly Recipes and even a 30 day Autoimmune Meal plan so I am certainly going to be picking that up when it drops.

Oh well folks, I have more Paleo and Autoimmune stuff lined up so remember to follow us on Facebook  to get all updates and please be kind and press the big red Google+1 button on the right hand side to help us get a foothold on Google Mountain.

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With the ‘never a spare minute’ way we all seem to live nowadays it can be hard to find time for parents to go and do their own regular exercise several times a week. Equally, getting kids out and exercising is not always easy during summer holidays or breaks when you still have to work and keep paying the bills so we have recently taken to exercising together on a Sunday in the local park and making it as fun as possible (that is, we never use the E word).

Fun Family Exercise

Our family consists of my wife and myself (mid 30’s), my daughter (8), son (6) and the newest arrival at 7 months (I am using my Jedi-parent mind trick to get him to exercise… yet) so we needed something that we can all do and all enjoy and the following are a few of the things that have been working out.

1. Frisbee

Who does not love tossing a frisbee and when you do it with your kids there will be a whole lot of chasing after the frisbee as it rolls in the wrong direction. Still, they picked this up pretty quick and now it makes for a fun and surprisingly taxing little workout that can be done in the middle of a walk in the park or some such to throw a sprint style workout into the mix.

2. Olympics (tabata sprints, jumps etc)

I am trying to work more sprinting into my week and a fun way we are doing this at the moment is for the five of us to go into the park and find a nice little spot to do a tabata sprint along. For those that don’t know, this is a 4 minute exercise where you run for 20 seconds and then rest for 10 seconds and repeat the whole thing 8 times. Sounds easy but is absolutely brutal.

So, to make this fun, we find a strip of about 100 metres and park the kids in the middle of this with a stop watch. They then time us and shout out “STOP” and “GO” and we run back and forth covering less and less distance. Then… we do the timing and get the kids to do the running.

We switch this up and do all sorts of bounding, skipping and jumping exercises (google plyometrics) and get the kids to time the lot – and then we time them and look like Nazi parents when normal people walk on by.

3. Stuck in the mud

This is a great game that works for the family or is even better with friends or a bigger group. You basically have one (or more) person on and they have to touch the other players. Once they have made contact that person is stuck in the mud and must stand with their arms out and legs open. The remaining players can then attempt to free them by either tagging them (easy) or going through their legs (difficult).

This works well with just one of the adults on or even with both of our kids against us. Likewise, if we have any other uncles, aunts and friends this can be a really fun and surprisingly challenging game – especially if you attempt it after two or three tabata sessions!

4. Tig

Surely everyone knows how to play tig? One person is on and they have to tig another player, and then they are on. Surprisingly fun, surprisingly tough.

5. Dodgeball

Similar to tig but with soft balls – lots of running, lots of laughs and a challenge for old and young alike.

Making fitness fun

It’s all too easy to get drawn into the whole ‘kids don’t do as much exercise’ as they used to way of thinking but in my mind that is horse crap. I have watched my two elder children jump on the trampoline for hours on end and that is some ass kicking exercise and they never stop running, jumping and ultimately, playing so in a way, this is not for them, this is for us! Sure, some kids don’t walk to school any longer and if they are allowed to eat too much junk, play too many video games and get overweight then they may slow down but it is your, our responsibility as parents to keep them active and to make it fun!

Give this a go and I am sure you will soon realise just how much fun it is to play, exercise as a family and how much you have missed it!

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If you have an autoimmune disease we have to take the Paleo diet a step further and do a thirty day elimination diet to test for sensitivities to nuts, eggs & nightshade vegetables like peppers, tomatoes, aubergines & potatoes. It also makes sense (if you can hack it) to remove coffee for the 30 days as well as that is a common gluten cross reactor (your body thinks it is gluten).

When reading about the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol, all too often the focus is on what you can’t eat rather than the wide and varied range of food choices left available to you so, rather than play the dietary Nazi, I am going lay out a list of foods that should for the basis of your shopping and I will follow this up next week with some simple ideas for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snacks (because I am nice like that).

Autoimmune Friendly Shopping List

So, just to be clear, all the following are 100% autoimmune protocol friendly and should form the basis of your shopping.

Vegetables

Your plate should be piled high with vegetables and the following are all 100% autoimmune friendly

• artichoke
• asparagus
• avocado
• beetroot
• broccoli
• brussels sprouts
• butternut squash
• carrot
• cauliflower
• celeriac
• celery
• chard
• collards
• courgette
• cress
• cucumbers
• kale
• kohlrabi
• leek
• lettuce
• mushrooms (all)
• okra
• onions
• parsnips
• pumpkin
• radish
• rhubarb
• shallots
• spinach
• squash (all)
• swede
• sweet potato
• turnips
• watercress
• yams

Fruits

Technically, no fruits are really off limits (discounting tomatoes) but it does make sense to try and stay on the lowish carb side of things and to avoid excessive amounts of fructose so I would work with the following list of low fructose fruits for the 30 day program and make these a snack rather than your main source of food.

• Pineapples
• strawberries
• raspberries
• blackberries
• lemons
• limes
• bananas
• rhubarb
• orange

Again, there are plenty to choose from and no reason to feel like you are denying yourself.

Meat & Fish

Well, it gets even easier here and we are fairly standard paleo at this point so some simple pointers to set you off on the right path should be enough.

Meat

Meat is pretty simple, you can buy the farm if you go for grass fed or pastured meat and you can eat the fattiest cuts you can find. If you are shopping in the supermarket then stick to lean cuts like pork loin, chicken breast etc and avoid fatty cuts of grain fed animals.

Fish

A Matter of Perspective

Ultimately, as with many things in life, this is simply a matter of perspective and you can view it as an exciting month of exploring new food choices OR you can mope and moan and attempt to hate your way through the month whilst you ultimately edge ever closer to giving in and giving up.

Remember, it’s only 30 days and you can try to reintroduce these foods and whilst you may find you have problems with some of them you are then a whole lot closer to securing your health.

Failing to plan is planning to fail

This is tough, no two ways about it, but do a little bit of planning and make sure you have a good set of meals laid out for breakfast, lunch and dinner else you are going to find yourself in a pickle, hungry and prone to making bad food choices. So, grab yourself a pen and pencil and sit down and sketch out some meals that you can shop for and fit in with what you and your family want to eat. Also, be sure to check back next week as I will lay out a bunch of my favorite breakfast, lunch and dinner recipes along with some autoimmune friendly snacks.

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We follow a pretty strict Paleo diet and are currently trying to switch to a couple of months of the even stricter autoimmune protocol but despite following a diet that is generally just meat and veg I still find some surprising sources of gluten and wheat. I am not trying to be super strict about reading the labels on pretty much everything and

The purpose of this article is to just keep a list of anything where the dreaded gluten bogeyman has had his sticky little fingers all over and where you simply would not have thought to check.

Contains Gluten (UK List)

• Baking Powder – Dr. Oetker
• Lemongrass & Ginger Green Tea – Tetley
• Cooked Turkey Breast – Bernard Matthews
• Pork Scratching / Pork Rind – most brands include wheat, soy & gluten
• Some brands of Beef Jerky – always check the label!

Contains Gluten (US List)

I am in the UK, so don’t really have anything for this list yet but please if you can drop a comment with all foods where some gluten has been sneaked in I can help to make this a useful resource for folks.

Gluten Exposure

If you are like us and doing your best to avoid gluten at every twist and turn then it is pretty annoying when it is sneaked into things like cooked turkey breast or green tea. So, lets start a policy of diligent label reading and see if we can’t get a solid list of unexpected sources of Gluten down here.

I am happy to do this for other countries so if anyone wants to maintain a page on the site for their country or just to send details over to me just get in touch.

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With the relentless barrage of advertising for yogurt drinks with ‘beneficial bacteria’ ‘gut friendly bacteria’ or simply ‘good bacteria’ it’s likely that most of us understand the benefit of getting some probiotic bacteria in our diets. The problem is, many of these yogurt drinks are not the natural or most healthy way to do this and they are in fact just yogurt which has been artificially populated with some good bacteria and not at the kind of levels that are needed to be truly therapeutic. And, the yogurt is likely from unhealthy, grain fed animals but that is a whole other story!

Fermented Vegetables to the Rescue

Fortunately, there is a better, easier and damn site cheaper way to get some gut friendly bacteria and that is through fermenting your own vegetables. Pretty much any vegetable can be fermented, but the easiest and quickest are sauerkraut and pickles (pickled cucumbers).

Lacto Fermentation

Cabbage for sauerkraut and cucumber both contain lactic bacteria so will ferment without any additional requirements other than some salt and water. Additionally, to ferment other vegetables, as long as you include some cabbage or cucumber, that will start the process off nicely.

Basic Fermented Vegetables Recipe

To keep it simple lets look at some pickles which are basically pickled cucumber. You could easily add carrots, cauliflower or experiment with other vegetables to see what works for you. You will need a jar to to ferment your vegetables in and ideally you want a jar that will allow air out but not in and these homemade fermentation jars are perfect. Alternatively, a standard preserving jar will do the job and the seal on these are designed to allow a little air to escape but not to let any in.

Ingredients

• a cucumber (or several of the small ones if you can source them)
• a sprig of dill (don’t worry about this too much)
• 1 clove of garlic
• several black pepper corns
• sea salt
• water

Instructions

Taste Challenge

I pre warn you, these are not going to taste like the pickles you are used to. They are pretty zingy and you may want to serve them with a bit of salt and balsalmic vinegar. They go well on the side of a steak or some other dish where you want something with a strong flavour (to replace crappy sugar laden sauce or some such). Anyhow, give them a go and let us know how you get on and if you enjoy them have a go at making your own home made fermentation jar.

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