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Comic Con & Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia

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This past Saturday we took a little family jaunt down to Philadelphia for the Wizard World Comic Convention (Comic Con). One of my acquaintances congratulated me on being a “great mom” for taking my kids to Comic Con.

Wonder Woman wannabe and the boys with their new Tribbles. Remember those?!

As much as I would love to take responsibility and adopt that particular moniker, I have to admit this trip was instigated by my husband G – a major “fan boy”. (Sorry, G, that’s the official term for you guys) G has been collecting action figures and reading comics practically his entire life. He knows more about it than anyone I know and has a passion for the artwork and the stories. He’s even been known to write some of his own. We have attended several Comic Conventions in New York City over the years but this is the first time we attended the one in Philly.

There was not much about Comic Con that is relevant to the Paleo lifestyle – Well, except the fact there were so many attendees who would probably look and feel a whole lot better if they went Primal. But I simply cannot resist sharing some of the photos of the costumed people. Some of them went all out and we were truly impressed with the creativity and passion. Sure, there were some goofballs but even the outlandish people were entertaining. It was a lot of fun. I bought a Wonder Woman t-shirt and I might admit, if pressed, to buying some Wonder Woman knee-socks (with capes).

Truth be told, Comic Con is far more for adults than for kids. Just check out some of the costumed attendees!

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Paleo and The City: Greensquare Tavern

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Greetings, everyone! “G,” here, filling in for Lea to write a glowing review of Greensquare Tavern, a very Paleo-friendly, “farm to table” restaurant in New York City.

Lea and I really enjoy dining out – probably too much, if my wallet has anything to say about it – but her celiac disease adds an extra dimension of difficulty to finding a suitable restaurant. On more than a few occasions we’ve found great restaurants unfortunately using ingredients that make it virtually impossible to dine safely, so we have been forced to cross them off our list. Therefore, it was a genuine pleasure to come across the Greensquare Tavern.

Located at 5 West 21st Street in Manhattan’s Flatiron District, Greensquare Tavern is spacious, airy, and inviting. A picture window in the front by the bar and a large, overhead skylight flood the dining area with soft, bright light even on a gray rainy day like the day of our visit.

We arrived just before the lunch rush and were greeted by Renee Typaldos, one of the managing partners. There were still plenty of seats, but that didn’t last long. Within 10 minutes, most of the tables were full of hungry office workers and assorted cube mice looking for a healthy, delicious lunch.

Greensquare Tavern

I started off as I usually do, by checking the beer list, and was pleased to inform Lea that Estrella Damm DAURA, a gluten-free ale from Spain, was available! She clapped her hands with delight and promptly ordered one in a large, frosty glass. There aren’t many gluten-free beers, and seemingly fewer restaurants that serve them, so a nice, tasty bottle of DAURA was an unexpected treat.

Estrella Damm Daura

After delivering the gluten-free beer, our waiter returned to tell us about the daily specials. Lea and I both started off with the Chilled Beet Soup. Chilled Beet Soup

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A “Paleo Spirit”: My Personal Health Journey

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Below is the original post as it appeared as a guest post for another paleo-related website:

What is Paleo Spirit?

My name is Lea and I am a wife to my husband, Gavin, and the mother of two boys, Benjamin and Nathaniel. When I was growing up, my father emphasized the importance of being “well-rounded”. Maybe that is one reason I take a particular interest in health for the whole person. My blog Paleo Spirit is dedicated to exploring fitness for mind, body, soul and spirit. Even though most of the posts at Paleo Spirit are about food, I enjoy delving into physical fitness, spiritual matters and even the political realm from time to time. I am not Paleo Spirit but I believe I HAVE a Paleo Spirit and so does anyone else who embraces the ideal of pursuing health and fulfillment through simple, time-tested strategies. It’s really about the beauty of a “Back to Basics” approach to life. My experiences and challenges have led me to where I am now and I enjoy writing about physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being.

How I Found The Paleo Diet

In spite of generally good health, for almost as long as I can remember I have been prone to illness. It was nothing terribly serious but I had a tendency to fall prey to respiratory infections at least twice a year and usually more. My mother wondered why I seemed to require more rest than everyone else in the family. When trying to donate blood over the years I was repeatedly turned away because of a low-level anemia. It was never bad enough that doctors took it very seriously but I often wondered how this could be true in spite of a rather healthful diet full of iron-rich foods.

Fast forward to 2003 when I was busy working in my career and taking care of my husband and two-year old son. During a stressful time, and following a particularly nasty respiratory infection, I experienced a drastic change in my health. Out of the blue I noticed my heart racing with the least exertion, I had absolutely no energy and got dizzy when standing up too fast. It seemed as though my thinking was clouded and I had trouble concentrating. Among other symptoms, I began noticing strange burning and tingling sensations in my hands and feet. My body ached. My doctor performed several blood tests and sent me to a few specialists to rule out various diseases and conditions. The echocardiogram was perfect, my blood work was stellar (except for the anemia) and it was not Lupus or Lyme disease. In spite of my doctor’s suspicion it might be Multiple Sclerosis, an exam by a neurologist showed no problems and the MRI ruled out MS.

You see, I was in perfect health!

But….I was definitely NOT okay.

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Birthday Blessings and Lilacs

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Today is my birthday so I hope you will excuse me if I take a few minutes to revel in my blessings. Some years my birthday actually falls on the same day as Mother’s Day. Minimally, both big days are always around the same time each year. It’s a double whammy of sweet gifts and well-wishes. Today, my youngest son’s classroom had a special event for Mother’s Day but it felt like one big birthday present. We did a little gardening, created some art, and were treated to a musical show. I was even interviewed (by my son!). He was sweet enough to whisper to his teacher about my birthday whereupon the entire crowd sang the Happy Birthday song to me. What a considerate sweetie and what a nice crowd!

Here we are with our gardening projects: a planter with sunflower seeds, an impatiens plant we put in a pot he decorated and some thyme we also planted together. You can’t see it but there’s also a clay project in the shape of Nathaniel’s imaginary friend “Rockguy”.

Here are my gifts that include a card he made and a poem. I love that Nathaniel’s teacher emphasizes poetry to the kids.

One of the benefits of a May birthday where I live is the gorgeous weather. This year our garden is already growing strong thanks to my husband, G, who built three raised garden beds last year. Here’s a peak.

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Women of Color Going Back to Basics for Health

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The recent Ladies’ Day Event, where I gave a presentation Happy, Healthy and Free, was attended by a majority of African-American women and other women of color. The information presented really seemed to resonate with many of the attendees for several reasons. After the presentation I had the opportunity to have lunch with some of these interesting ladies and find out a bit more about them. In the course of our conversations, a few things stood out as very significant and relevant to my topic of health.

One of the women at my table was Wendy. Wendy, who is 68 years old, explained how she is not currently on any medications. That’s pretty impressive given our medicated society. So I asked Wendy a few more questions to find out if there are any clues to her seeming good health. It turns out she is from Barbados. Could this make a difference? Hmmm…..

Before I tell you more about Wendy and her background, let’s first take a look at the broader problem as it relates specifically to women of color. Alice Randall, writer in residence at Vanderbilt University, and an African-American woman herself, wrote an interesting opinion piece for The New York Times this past weekend. In her article, Black Women and Fat, Ms. Randall points out four out of five black women are seriously overweight and one in four middle-aged black women has diabetes. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks have 51 percent higher obesity rates than whites. In addition to pointing out some facts and figures on disease states and obesity rates, Alice Randall delves into some of the cultural reasons that may be contributing to this situation. She points out that it is part of the cultural heritage to be bigger and that husbands sometimes revolt when faced with the prospect of their wives losing weight. But Ms. Randall advises that in spite of any cultural push against it, things need to change:

The billions that we are spending to treat diabetes is money that we don’t have for education reform or retirement benefits, and what’s worse, it’s estimated that the total cost of America’s obesity epidemic could reach almost $1 trillion by 2030 if we keep on doing what we have been doing.

During a public lecture at Harvard University recently, biologist Daniel Lieberman suggested that exercise for everyone should be mandated by law. Alice Randall was appalled and noted the applause came from a bunch of “thin affluent people” applauding the idea of “forcing fatties, many of whom are dark, poor and exhausted, to exercise.” She goes on to express her view that government mandated exercise is a “vicious concept” but acknowledges the “cost of too many people getting too fat is too high.”

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Happy, Healthy and Free

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“What we think, we become.”

It was my honor and privilege to be one of the speakers at a Ladies Day event yesterday hosted by the Bridgewater Church of Christ (at Garretson Rd) . The theme of the event was “Do You Know Who I Am?” and my topic was “Happy, Healthy and Free”. This is a subject very near and dear to my heart because I am very passionate about health and fitness for the WHOLE person Mind, Body, Soul and Spirit.

The starting point for my talk was the Bible verse Luke 2:52

Jesus grew in wisdom, and in stature, and in favor with God and Man.

That verse encapsulates the entire 18 year period of Jesus’ growth from age 12 to the beginning of his ministry at the age of 30. It tells us that He grew mentally, physically, spiritually and socially. And I propose that we too need to focus on growing in these areas of our lives in order to be well-rounded individuals. I proposed how, instead of Happy, Healthy and Free, we are often Sick, Stressed and Depressed. This is something with which I am familiar because I have been all three of those things at certain points in my life. I shared some of what I have learned about the Mind-Body connection and how our bodies respond to stress. And lest anyone think that focusing on our own health is somehow self-indulgent, I argued that we NEED to work at our health in order to become more pleasing and useful to God.

What we think, we become. And just as the Lao Tzu quote expresses, our habits become our character which becomes our destiny. With that in mind, and through my own experiences, I have come up with Ten Healthy Habits for the Well-Rounded Person:

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Paleo FX 2012: Movement and Fitness

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In addition to lectures and Mastermind panel discussions, the Paleo FX Ancestral Momentum – Theory to Practice Symposium included several movement and fitness sessions. I tried to plan my schedule so I could participate in a few movement sessions without missing too many other things of special interest. Here are some highlights from the main fitness/movements sessions I attended.

MovNat

One of my main goals was to attend a MovNat session. MovNat was founded by Erwan Le Corre who has been proclaimed “one of the fittest men in the world” and a “fitness visionary” by Men’s Health magazine.

Erwan Le Corre via www.movnat.com

MovNat is a physical education and fitness system based entirely on using the full range of our natural, human-specific movements and is aimed at the real-world competency and conditioning that allows optimum physical and mental development.

There are thirteen basic MovNat movement skills:

  1. Lifting
  2. Carrying
  3. Throwing
  4. Catching
  5. Striking
  6. Grappling
  7. Walking
  8. Running
  9. Balancing
  10. Jumping
  11. Crawling
  12. Climbing
  13. Swimming

Here’s a short video that gives some examples of a MovNat workout.

Our instructor Brian led us through some MovNat skill training.

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Paleo FX 2012: Opening Night

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I just returned from an exciting trip to Paleo FX in Austin, TX, March 14-17. Rather than writing one huge tome about my experience, it makes more sense to break it up into pieces. So I will start by simply explaining the nature of the event with some photos of some of the cool people in attendance on opening night. In future posts I can get into more details about the presentations and fitness sessions. If you want to know more about it right away, there are several great write-ups already posted in the paleo blogosphere. (Check out this post and video).

The PaleoFX Ancestral Momentum – Theory to Practice Symposium was a multi-day, hands-on event. It was a collaboration among fitness and healthcare professionals, nutritionists, research scientists and laypersons seeking to address modern health challenges through the application of ancestral based theory in practice. In other words, lots of folks with different backgrounds got together to explore how to put paleo diet and fitness information into action in a practical way. It was held at The Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports on the campus of the University of Texas – Austin. As a graduate of staunch rival Texas A&M University, this was a slight conflict of interest for me! The Stark Center overlooks the football field and I felt like I was in “the belly of the beast” so to speak.

Texas Memorial Stadium
Texas Memorial Stadium

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“Food Activist” or Freedom Fighter?

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This is not a political blog. Paleo Spirit is primarily a food blog that emphasizes the paleo way of eating and a healthy lifestyle that explores ways to improve “fitness” in all areas of our life – mind, body and soul. I want to be welcoming to people of all different persuasions and I know there are some readers who will be turned off at the mere mention of something that falls into the political realm. However, I had an interesting experience that I would like to share. And in my opinion this discussion could be categorized under “mind” because we should all make ourselves as educated as possible in order to navigate effectively in our world.

There is so much that goes on in politics that affects our lives and that includes how much control the government exercises over us. I am a strong believer in freedom and individual responsibility. And one of the ways we can lose freedom is when the government has enough power to tell us how and what to eat. For those of us who have seen and experienced the negative results of following the “Conventional Wisdom” of healthy eating, as espoused by the U.S. government (low-fat, high carb, etc…), we can attest to the fact government does not always know best. And this is not a liberal or conservative issue, it is a life or death issue.

I was motivated to call The Rush Limbaugh Program on March 9th because I heard him quoting, at length, from an article written by heart surgeon Dr. Dwight Lundell. “Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease”  In the course of quoting Dr. Lundell, Rush Limbaugh also expressed his view that it is liberal “food activists” who are imploring the government to “step in and save us” by implementing regulations that seek to alter our freedoms by positioning themselves as our “guardians”. Later in his remarks, Mr. Limbaugh pointed out the importance of individual freedom in the realm of dietary choices. I knew I wanted to call the program to let Rush know there are those of us who might consider ourselves “food activists” in a sense and yet do not seek to force our views and dietary decisions on others. We seek to educate and, in some cases, advocate for change in government activities.

Think about whether or not you are in favor of laws banning the sale of raw milk. And note how government subsidies of the corn industry change the marketplace and consider those ramifications. Then there was the recent story of the pre-school girl whose homemade lunch (turkey and cheese sandwich, chips, banana and apple juice) was inspected and deemed unsatisfactory by school officials. This child was forced to purchase the “more nutritious” school lunch which consisted of chicken nuggets! Regardless of your personal views of her homemade lunch, do you really want the government mandating what a child must be fed? Adherents of the paleo diet choose not to eat grains. Do you really like the prospect of the government forcing you to feed your child “whole grains” because it is supposedly “healthier”? I certainly do not!

It is a freedom issue, pure and simple.

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