درسنامه تفسیری

Commentary

Hi, this is AJ and welcome to the commentary for this month’s lesson.

Last year I had been in Asia for a while, staying in Japan, living in Japan, also visiting Thailand and Vietnam. So I’d been in Asia, I don’t know, five, six months maybe more and then my wife and I, Tomoe and I, we flew to America to see my family.

And we eventually got to Indiana, which is in the middle of the country, in the middle of the United States. It’s called the Midwest, this part of the United States; right in the middle.

And immediately, upon arriving in the Midwest, I could feel that something was wrong. I’d look around and everywhere I looked I saw fat, overweight, unhealthy people.

I saw many, many, many people my age– in their 40s, in their 50s– who looked like they were 10 or 20 years older. Heavy, their skin didn’t look healthy, they looked like it was difficult for them to walk. But even people much younger than I am, also, were overweight and unhealthy looking.

Sometimes walking around in different shopping centers, malls or stores, of course, you would occasionally see people who were very, very fat, who were obese. (Obese means super, super fat, very, very unhealthy).

And I realized I could feel deep inside, something is wrong this is not right. There’s something wrong in America. This is not healthy. So I feel bad for these people, because they are missing so many great things in life because they’re so unhealthy.

Of course, they probably won’t live as long. They have a lot of different health problems and diseases and things, but even right in the moment they’re missing so much of life because their energy is so low, their fitness level is so low.

And so that’s why for me, health and fitness, so important. And especially as we get older. The problem is, young people think they can be unhealthy and do it forever, and if you’re very young you can’t.

See sometimes when you’re 16, 17 or 18 or 20 years old, yeah, you can eat kind of unhealthy food and you can be a bit physically lazy and you won’t become super fat. Although, even this is changing in the United States, throughout Europe, you’re seeing younger and younger people getting fat and unhealthy.

But generally, when you’re younger you can kind of do this, but the problem is you’re doing damage and that as you get older, you’re going to get more and more unhealthy. You’re going to get fatter and fatter, if you don’t eat well. If you don’t exercise. If you don’t take care of yourself.

And each year you get older it becomes more and more important. So you don’t have to be weak. You don’t have to be fat. You don’t have to be sick when you get older, but you have to become disciplined about eating well.

So, in our interactive lesson, Mark Sisson talked a bit about how we can figure out a good way to eat and a good way to exercise, because it’s so confusing right? Everybody has a diet.

There are so many different diets. Vegan diets, vegetarian diets, Paleo, Primal, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There’s the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet. There are new diets and new diet books coming out every day. So it’s super confusing and every diet book seems to have evidence to show that they are correct.

But they can’t all be correct. So, I think Mark Sisson has a better approach which is to look at our ancestors. We have a lot of good evidence about our ancestors from 10k years ago. When we examine their bones.

When we examine what’s left of them, the buried remains, the bones and teeth of our ancestors. Scientists can look at these and they can see that they were quite healthy. They didn’t have a lot of cavities in their teeth, for example, holes in their teeth like we do now. We have to go to the dentist.

Well, they didn’t have dentists 10k years ago, so how did they survive without dentists? Well, they just were stronger and healthier because of how they ate and how they lived they didn’t have a lot of teeth problems like we do now.

Our teeth problems are not natural they’re caused by the way we eat and the way we live. All of our teeth problems are a sign that we’re doing something wrong. The same thing with all of the obesity, the terrible fat in us, it’s a sign that something is wrong.

So let’s talk about what we can do to be more like our strong healthy ancestors.

Food, strong healthy ancestors. How did our ancestors eat 10k years ago or more? We know one thing that they were not farmers. They did not eat grains very much. They didn’t grow lots and lots of corn. They didn’t grow wheat.

No, they had to just walk around all day picking up plants. So they would dig up plants like yams, sweet potatoes or versions of that, those kinds of root vegetables. They would dig those up. They ate a lot of those.

And they would gather other plants like leaves, kind of what we eat now– kale and lettuce– those leafy green vegetables. They would walk around and find wild vegetables and pick them up, gather them and eat them.

They would gather fruit during the summer or if it was tropical, berries. All these things were easy to pick and to eat immediately. So our bodies evolved to get nutrition from those plants.

And our bodies do not digest other kinds of plants as well. For example, wheat and corn, and yet now what do we do? We eat wheat and corn so much, it’s in so much food especially processed food.

In general, 10k years ago there was no processed food, all these boxed foods we have now, all of that processed sugar that we eat now didn’t exist then.

So they ate lots and lots and lots of natural vegetables that they dug up from the ground or they just picked. And they ate some fruit and berries during the season when it was sunny and warm.

Another thing they ate a lot of were meat, fish and eggs. So they hunted, right, they were hunter/gatherers. They gathered the plants but not really grains, not wheat, not corn, not that kind of stuff; mostly green vegetables and things they would dig up, and occasionally fruit and berries.

And then they also hunted. They hunted animals for meat. They fished and they found eggs of different animals too, of different birds. So that’s mostly what they ate, those two categories of foods.

Now, in terms of meats, nowadays when we go to the grocery store, we only eat the muscle of an animal. We eat their muscles. When you’re buying, when you’re eating meat, when you’re eating steak, hamburger or chicken, especially in the United States.

Mostly, what you’re getting is just the muscle, but our ancestors 10k years ago they ate the whole animal. They ate all the organs too. They ate the liver, the heart and lungs, and this is important because many of these organs actually have fantastic nutrition. Liver probably is the number one super food, in terms of nutrition. If you look at the vitamins and minerals in liver it’s amazing– beef liver, chicken liver and the liver of other animals too.

In fact, I myself have just started eating liver recently and I’ve noticed my energy going up. In the last few, weeks my energy is going higher and higher because I’m eating liver every week. I plan to start adding in other organs such as heart or kidneys as well.

So they ate more of the whole animal, this is important as well. Now, if you’re a vegetarian no problem, you can still eat lots of eggs, lots of vegetables, lots of real foods.

So this gives us a guide. Again, this primal mentality of looking at our ancestors from 10k years ago, it gives us an idea of the direction we should go, how we should eat for better health and you can modify that for yourself.

If you choose to be vegan or vegetarian or eat meat. You can modify it but you can still look more to the past, instead of getting confused by all the scientific studies, look to our ancestors. They show us the way. We should not forget the wisdom, the legacy of our ancestors.

And, of course, it’s the same for exercise, for fitness, for being strong, for having a lot of energy. When you look at our ancestors, when you look at hunter/gatherers even today, modern hunter/gatherers; there are still a few tribes in the jungle down in Brazil and other places, where they’re still hunter/gatherer tribes– in Africa.

And we see something about these people, they stay strong and healthy as they get older. It’s not like modern humans when they become 40, 50 and 60, they start getting fat and tired. That doesn’t happen to the hunter/ gatherers.

They stay strong. They stay energetic and healthy, even when they’re in their 50s, 60s and 70s, right up until they die. So, another thing about them, exercise… we have a lot of different ways we can exercise in the modern world, but if we look at our ancestors what did they do?

• Number one, lots of low-level activity.

Extensive low-level activity as Mark Sisson says. Mainly, that was walking. To gather food, they had to walk a lot. I mean every day, just imagine… if every day you had to walk around and find plants to eat, you would do a lot of walking.

You’d have to walk over a large area to find enough plants to eat for the day. So they did a lot of walking to gather food and it’s the same with hunting.

• Hunting a wild animal is not easy and remember they did not have guns.

They were using spears and maybe bows and arrows, and so they had to do a lot of walking to find the animals. They had to find the tracks and walk and follow. So lots and lots of walking.

Different people say different things, but generally we can guess that our ancestors were walking probably three, four or five hours every single day. That’s a lot more than we do now.

• They had brief, brief moments of high intensity exercise.

So very, very intense, very powerful, very difficult exercise. They would have this but briefly, maybe a few times a week, once or twice a week. They weren’t lifting weights and going to the gym like us so what were they doing? Well, number one they were sprinting, they were running as fast as possible.

Why would they do that? The hunters would do it to chase the animal right. Once they shot an animal– if you shoot an animal with a bow and arrow or spear, if it’s kind of big, it’s probably not going to die immediately, it’s going to run.

You’ve wounded it. You’ve hurt it, but it’s going to run and so they would have to chase after the animal. They would have to run fast to do that that’s hard intense exercise.

Sometimes they would wrestle with each other, wrestle and kind of play fight with each other or play games with each other, but they would have these more intense things.

They would have to climb. They would have to lift heavy things. Again, a big animal, after you killed it, you would have to pick it up, this big heavy animal and carry it back to your village. So they just naturally had to do things that required strength as well.

• Another thing about our ancestors, they were outdoors a lot most of the time, so they were getting a lot of sun every day.

This is also important. See, when you get sunlight, your body creates vitamin D. Your body creates vitamin D from sunlight. And vitamin D is actually a very, very powerful vitamin. It affects your body in many ways. It makes you stronger. It makes you better at fighting diseases, for example, it helps your immune system.

Well, nowadays we spend so much of our time indoors, most of us are not getting enough sunlight and therefore we’re weaker, because we don’t have enough vitamin D. So that’s another thing we can learn from our ancestors. They were outdoors most of the day.

So how do we adapt all of this to our modern world, right? We’re not going to go back living in caves most of us. We’re not going to go back to being hunter/gatherers. It’s not practical. So we have to adapt these ideas to the modern world.

But we can do it. With eating we can create a kind of primal way of eating that models that follows our ancestors. So we’re going to eat whole foods. If we eat meat, we’re going to eat a variety of different animals and we’re going to also try to eat more of the organs as well. You can start with liver. Liver’s a really good one, start trying to eat liver once a week, twice a week.

With vegetables, we’re going to focus more on the kinds of vegetables our ancestors ate, so more of the leafy green vegetables, more of the root vegetables that we dig up like carrots, sweet potatoes, potatoes, yams, taro that kind of stuff.

And, we’re gonna eat fruit but we’re not gonna go crazy with the fruit, because fruit can have a lot of sugar, so fruit’s great but remember our ancestors ate fruit mostly in the spring, the summer, the warmer months and not so much in the winter.

There was really no fruit in the winter, at least for the people who lived in the north. So don’t go too crazy on the fruit.

You’re gonna avoid things that our ancestors never ate. You’re gonna avoid processed foods, especially stuff with sugar in it, anything with sugar. Sodas, forget it. Anything that comes from a box forget it. Anything with added processed sugar, forget it.

I also recommend reducing or eliminating grains, especially wheat and corn. Reduce or eliminate wheat and corn. Rice seems to be a little healthier. Rice seems like it’s not so bad for grains, so if you need to eat a grain, if you feel like you need some kind of grain for your food, I recommend focusing more on rice and try to cut out wheat and corn, and other ones.

In terms of exercise, can we all be outdoors five-six hours a day? Most of us cannot. Most of us have indoor jobs. But, when you’re not working, get outdoors as much as possible. I recommend, first of all, you should be exercising every day. Try to do it outdoors.

This is the one thing, so if you want to do strength exercises, instead of going to a gym and working out indoors, why don’t you go outside and do push-ups and pull-ups. Go to a playground. Go to a field and try to do a bunch of body weight exercises outdoors, so you’re getting that sun and that fresh air.

You can do sprints outdoors. You can go for long walks. Go for a walk during your lunch break. Go for a walk with your family, instead of watching TV indoors, everybody go outside and go for a walk. A long walk, an hour, two hours… walk around a park if you’re in a city. I walk around a park; I’ll just go in circles for a couple hours every day. So get outdoors more.

Getting outdoors will really help your mood. You get more sunlight. Your vitamin D level will go up, which makes your body stronger. It’s just a very, very positive thing to do, very primal like our ancestors. It reconnects us to our ancestors.

They were strong and healthy people and we also can be strong and healthy, if we reconnect to their wisdom, if we reconnect to their way of life.

So, this month, your action plan…

• I want you to try and live a more primal life. To live more like our ancestors this month.

• For food, eat the foods they ate and try to avoid the foods they didn’t eat.

• For exercise, every single day get outdoors and do some low-level easy exercise. That really means mostly walking. Walk an hour or two every day outdoors.

• Every week, at least once a week maybe twice a week, do some harder exercise, something more difficult. It might be push-ups and pull-ups and body weight stuff. It could be lifting weights. It could be running fast or running hard. It might be climbing.

Whatever it is, just do something a little more tough that requires some strength once or twice a week.

In general, get outdoors, get outdoors, get outdoors; close the computer, turn off the TV, get outside more; more and more and more. You should be outdoors for several hours every single day.

That is your homework this month.

All right, I’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye for now.