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Cantaloupe Stuffed with Blackberries and Pecans

1 cantaloupe

1 c blackberries

½ c chopped pecans

Mint or spearmint leaves

for garnish

Cut cantaloupe in half (using a serrated knife), and scoop out seeds. Fill each cavity with blackberries and pecans. Garnish with mint or spearmint leaves. Serves two.

Strawberry-Blueberry Horizon

1 c fresh strawberries

1 c fresh blueberries

½ tangerine, sectioned

1 T freshly squeezed orange juice

1 tsp natural vanilla extract

Ground nutmeg

Fresh mint

Mix the strawberries, blueberries, and tangerine sections in a bowl. Drip with orange juice and vanilla, and sprinkle with nutmeg. Serve chilled and garnished with mint. Serves three.

11

Paleo Exercise

Eating alone will not keep a man well; he must also take exercise.

—Hippocrates

Regular physical activity is every bit as important as diet in achieving good health and permanent weight loss. Regular exercise can:

• Improve your insulin metabolism

• Increase HDL cholesterol and reduce blood triglycerides

• Lower your blood pressure

• Strengthen your heart and blood vessels

• Reduce your risk of developing heart disease and type 2 diabetes

• Alleviate stress, improve your mental outlook, and help you to sleep better

• Possibly increase bone mineral density in people under thirty and slow bone loss in older people

Here again, we need to follow the example set by our hunter-gatherer ancestors and use their activity levels as a guide for our own.

I must tell you that when asked to choose between doing long, hard, repetitive work and simply relaxing, or having fun, huntergatherers—just like their modern descendants—invariably would have opted for the latter two choices. In fact, the idea of exercise itself would have baffled these people. After all, no reasonable hunter-gatherers would have lifted heavy stones or run in circles for the mere sake of getting a “workout.” Convincing them to continue these boring activities—or to develop a fitness plan—would have been impossible.

The huge difference between Paleolithic people and us is that they had no choice but to do hard manual labor on a regular basis. Their lives depended on it. Most of ours do not.

Exercise Plus Paleo Diet Equals Health: Joe’s Story

Joe Friel is an internationally known expert on fitness who has coached Olympic triathletes and is the author of a number of best-selling books for triathletes and cyclists. Here are his experiences with Paleo diets:

I have known Dr. Cordain for many years, but I didn’t become aware of his work until 1995. That year we began to discuss nutrition for sports. As a longtime adherent to a very-high-carbohydrate diet for athletes, I was skeptical of his claim that eating less starch would benefit performance. Nearly every successful endurance athlete I had known ate as I did, with a heavy emphasis on cereals, bread, rice, pasta, pancakes, and potatoes. In fact, I had done quite well on this diet, having been an All-American age-group duathlete (bike and run), finishing in the top ten at World Championships. I had also coached many successful athletes, both professional and amateur, who ate the same way I did.

Our discussions eventually led to a challenge. Dr. Cordain suggested I try eating a diet more in line with what he recommended for one month. I took the challenge, determined to show him that eating as I had for years was the way to go. I started by simply cutting back significantly on starches and replacing those lost calories with fruits, vegetables, and very lean meats.

For the first two weeks I felt miserable. My recovery following workouts was slow, and my workouts were sluggish. I knew that I was well on my way to proving that he was wrong. But in week three, a curious thing happened. I began to notice that I was not only feeling better, but that my recovery was speeding up significantly. In the fourth week I experimented to see how many hours I could train.

Since my early forties (I was