"Going primal? and ?going paleo? sound like strange activities indeed, but for many the so-called Primal movement is a way of life that aims to create healthier bodies by subsisting on diets similar to those of our early human ancestors.
The ?paleolithic? diet has been around for a few decades, but has recently picked up steam as a health and fitness trend. (Here at the Austin Post, one of our highest ranked articles of all time is a guide to eating paleo at restaurants.) The basics of the diet are to get as close to a pre-industrial caveman?s diet as possible, cutting out processed foods and eating primarily meat, fish, wild fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds.
Natural movement - or ?MoveNat? - is a training and workout philosophy where people work out by skipping machines and air-conditioned gyms and getting back to the ways human bodies were meant to move. In practice, this means jumping, running, crawling and swimming, lifting and throwing things found in nature and self-defense.
Austinites Tracy and Bryan Barksdale, both 23, founded the Austin Primal Living Meetup group after they adopted the lifestyle around two years ago. Bryan is now doing research into the connections between diet and neuro degenerative diseases as a student at UTMB in Galveston, and Tracy has become one of the first certified MoveNat instructors in Texas.
We talked to the Barksdales about Austin?s Primal scene, what it means and why this lifestyle has become so popular.
Austin Post: What does it mean to go ?Primal,? and what is the difference between primal and the Paleo Diet?
Bryan: Really, I don?t see much of a distinction between it. There?s orthodox Paleo and it doesn?t include any dairy, but then Mark Sisson and other people coined the term primal, which includes a little butter and cheese ? raw dairy. I don?t make the distinction. I think of it as an ancestral diet. I don?t even think of it as hunter gatherer ? I think of it as ancestral, real food.
Austin Post:?And how does MoveNat fit in?
Tracy: People come to it through different ways. I think most people, at least I, discovered the diet first, and then from there, they think: "What else can I change about my lifestyle that might not be very good for me?" And one of the first things that can be is the way you work out. So natural movement is something that I do that is kind of a fitness program, concentrating on evolutionarily natural human movements, things like crawling, jumping, climbing, barefoot running ? stuff like that that we don?t necessarily do in our modern lives. That?s just kind of one aspect of the whole [primal] lifestyle that people tend to fall into.
Austin Post:?Is it just the diet and the workout, or does going Primal mean other things as well? Clothing, things around the house, etc?
Bryan: Clothing-wise, not really. We have minimalist shoes that allow your feet to actually support your weight through the ground.
Tracy: Another one we?ll do is shampoo. ?We try not to use any lotions or shampoos with harsh chemicals. We try not to put anything on our bodies that might be toxic in any way.
Bryan: Anything that you can?t eat, you probably shouldn?t put it on your body. Then we try to get enough sun exposure to get vitamin D, fresh clean water with minerals if we can find it, 8 to 9 hours of sleep every night in a pitch black room and a dawn simulator alarm clock that simulates the sun coming up so you wake to light instead of a blaring noise. We try to reduce our stress overall.
Austin Post:?That?s pretty comprehensive. How and why did you start going Primal?
Bryan: [The Meetup group] has been going about two years. I probably started doing the diet and lifestyle a year before that. I?d always been interested in health and I was at UT and doing research, and I just happened to one day stumble across a paper by Loren Cordain on the difference between the modern diet and the hunter-gatherer diet, and it made a lot of sense to me. Previously I had been vegetarian, and [the paleo diet] made sense so I started reading more and more, blogs, papers to find out more. And then I saw John Durant on the Colbert Report ? he?s one of the organizers for the new York Paleo Meetup there ? and I decided that probably Austin?s ideal for that, and there?s gotta be other people in Austin that do the same thing. So I just on a whim decided to start the group, and planned a Meetup and actually a lot of people came, so we kept doing it. Now we have around 500 members.
Tracy: We had been dating before, and then when he stared going paleo, I was really reluctant and did it for a little while, but slowly and surely started getting into to it. And then I made the jump in January 2011.
Austin Post:?What?s the hardest thing about going Primal?
Tracy: I?d still say the sugar. That?s very, very addicting and I?ll still struggle with that. Like if I have some chocolate, then the next day I?ll want it.
Austin Post:?Has following the Primal lifestyle affected your social life at all? Does it limit where you can go to spend time with people?
Bryan: That?s part of the reason why I started the group in the first place. It can be kind of difficult to go out with friends or to a party or any social gathering and be able to eat the food, and have the drinks. Part of it was to have a social group where you didn?t have to worry about what you were eating, but I don?t see much limitation. Most restaurants are very knowledgable about gluten now; every restaurant is going to have a meat and a vegetable, and that?s basically the mainstay of the diet. And we were never big partiers or drinkers, but you can adapt things so that instead of having beer, you can have cider so that it would be gluten free, or clear liquors or wine.
We live in a modern world, so we?re going to have fun when we can.
Austin Post:?When it comes to MoveNat, is there a structure to the workouts between groups, or do you just try to go outside and move like a caveman?
Tracy: You can stumble on the movement on your own, kind of, but the MoveNat system puts an organized structure on it, so that if you do want to train and lose weight and get better with it in general, you can do it through a trainer. So there is an organization and a structure for that, but we?re not claiming that these movements are unique to MoveNat. Every single human has the capabilities to move naturally, we just kind of put a program to it.
I?m the MoveNat trainer of the group, and I?ve been teaching MoveNat intro classes (through the Austin Natural Movement Meetup group) and I?m rolling out personal training for that as well. And I?m going to be doing workshops around Texas for people who want to pick it up. I did dance my whole life, but in college I wasn?t very active and then once I started getting into the Paleo diet I realized that I needed to be more active. So I discovered MoveNat and have been with it ever sense
MoveNat.com is the big company, and then I have MoveNatTexas which right now we?re just on Facebook, but I?m in the process of a website on that as well. I?m one of like 100 people in the world right now to be certified ? they just now certified them.
Austin Post:?What do you think of the recent rise in popularity of the Primal lifestyle, Paleo diet and natural movement?
Bryan: It seems to have really picked up in the last couple of years, I would say. Loren Cordain?s first book came out in 2000, and I think it didn?t become more popular until like 2008. Now there are meetups in every major city, there are cookbooks, there are lots of different events ? like we went to the ancestral health symposium, and that was a lot of fun, and that was more research-oriented.
Paleo in Austin is really picking up, too. Our friends Keith and Michelle Norris, they started a conference here in Austin called Paleo FX in March during SXSW and they are planning on keeping it here.
[When I started as a med student at UTMB], I was mostly interested in just doing basic science research in neuroscience, and then I started getting interested in health and the Paleo Diet and how these things affect chronic diseases, so it encouraged me to pursue an MD. Now I?m interested researching how we can prevent neuro degenetrative diseases.
I think most researchers will agree that [diet affects mental health.] The type of diet may be different from what we [advocate], but there?s definitely a big link between diet, information and Alzheimer's.
Austin Post:?Are there any books that you would suggest for people wanting to get into the lifestyle?
Bryan: The three would be ?It Starts With Food,? by Dallas and Melissa Hartwig. Then one that just came out is ?Practical Paleo? by Diane Sanfilippo. And ?The Primal Blueprint? by Mark Sisson and there?s a new edition of that.
Source: http://www.austinpost.org/food/living-primal-austin-eat-and-work-out-early-human
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