The Lifestyle of a Surfing Legend

"I think the key to happiness is maximizing each day. So if you're unhappy,
here's a simple prescription: Live harder." -Laird Hamilton 

Laird Hamilton. Lance Armstrong. Micheal Jordan. See where I'm going with this? These men are sports icons. They have accomplished more than most men dream and have pushed the boundaries of sport in ways unimaginable. To many they are heroes and to all they are legends. But only one of them has a self-help book.

That book is Force of Nature, an examination of Laird Hamilton's success in surfing and in life. It breaks things down into four sections, Mind, Body, Soul, and Surfing, going into detail about his diet, training, social life, purpose, attitude, goal-setting, etc. in order to decode how and why Laird Hamilton became the surfing phenom that he is today.

And get this. He doesn't know it, but Laird Hamilton is living an ancestral lifestyle, one that is admirably close to nature in almost every way. In fact, Hamilton's lifestyle is an ideal example for all of us.

In the nutrition section, he praises organic, free-range beef as his number 1 favorite food. He explains that it's superior even to grass-fed beef, saying, "The closer to the wild, the better." He then goes on to sing the praises of raw seafood, seaweed, coconut oil, and raw butter from the milk of grass-fed cows. He extols the virtue of eating "real food from the earth" and warns readers to "beware of any 'food' that has been created by humans rather than nature." Sound familiar?

On a short list of the four foods he avoids, the first is bread, the second is pizza, and the third is soda. (The fourth on the list was cheese, but then he includes it later in grocery lists and dishes and admits that he prefers raw cheese...I'm not sure why he included it here with the others. This list should have been the 3 foods he avoids, given how he and the publisher/editor looked rather favorably on the right kinds of cheeses.)

Hamilton's training routine focuses on functional fitness. He writes, "It's not how much weight you can lift, it's how much strength you can incorporate into your movements. You want strength that you can actually control and apply." He also advocates changing up your routine and working on balance. These ideas are central to the programming you see in the world of ancestral health, where movements are based on natural patterns and skill-building.

Hamilton is also big on going barefoot:

"As many runners are discovering, shoes can actually decondition feet. That weakness leads to decreased performance and increased injury, which is why many athletes are now incorporating barefoot training into their workouts. 

I go barefoot whenever I can. When I surf, I'm using every last muscle, ligament, and tendon down there. There's a matrix of tiny muscles between the sole and ankle that most people aren't even aware of. I need them. I need my feet and toes to be able to dig in; to be sensitive, flexible, strong, and resilient. I don't need them to be trussed up and immobile--ever...Anyone who's ever walked barefoot through warm sand or cool grass knows that feeling the earth through your soles is one of life's great joys." 

The book also slights mainstream advice. In a brief cameo by trainer and educator Paul Chek of the Corrective Holistic Exercise Kinesiology Institute, Chek writes, "I'm constantly amazed -- perplexed, actually -- at how all these people with master's degrees and PhDs in health and medicine can't even keep themselves healthy. They don't eat right, and they don't know how to take care of themselves. Some of the sickest people in the world are at nutrition conferences. Blows my mind." While knowing health and practicing health are two separate things for many health professionals due to the demands of their education and careers, I certainly agree that conventional health authorities may not be the ideal place for people seeking to optimize their health. The purpose of medicine, after all, is to make sick people better. And the purpose of nutrition is to reasonably sustain the Average Joe. Neither of these seek optimization.

This book is good for its simple, fad-free accessibility, built only on the popular brand of Laird Hamilton himself. It's something that anyone can pick up and respect. And the fact that it's so in line with an evolutionary perspective, without ever saying so, means winning my endorsement. Hamilton is a strong example of the ancestral lifestyle, so immersed in nature, that he makes me feel like a slacker.

While the book has some minor problems, I would recommend it to anyone for the quality advice and the cogent way it captures all the elements of health and well-being within an overall lifestyle. Here, it's presented as a surfing lifestyle -- but I like to see it as one very close to nature. In evolutionary terms.

"I may be an extreme case, but we all need to take risks. I think it goes back to our primitive state, our deepest DNA, when we were hunters and had to avoid getting eaten by large animals. Survival meant risk. The thirst for adventure is part of human nature. It's in every cell of our bodies."- Laird Hamilton

Why You're Not as Healthy as You Think, and What to Do About It

I hate to say it, but you're probably not healthy. People all around us are going about their days assuming that they are, in fact, beaming balls of energy with robust immune systems and unlimited physical potential. This is one of the most common fallacies today.

Keep an open eye and you'll see it in people all the time. They assume they're healthy despite obvious signs to the contrary. These are people that say they can tolerate wheat 'just fine' and later complain about trouble sleeping. These are the ones that talk about how great 'they feel' on a vegetarian diet, yet they look lethargic and frail.

These people are lying to themselves.

In psychology, it's known as the optimism bias, the human penchant to look at things slightly on the positive side when they're about you. The instances can be glaring, such as smokers who think they'll fare better than others in regard to disease. Or the instances can be common, such as drivers who believe their risk of an accident is lower than it actually is. Ultimately, the optimism bias is just one more way that people can't get over themselves.

But this is a human problem, and it's pervasive.

Self-perceptions are flawed for all kinds of reasons, but the optimism bias plays a significant role. This is true for me and nearly everyone. It's our job to keep this is mind when evaluating our health, which will in turn affects our goals.

We have to raise our standard of health by looking at symptoms closely. That means every pimple, every restless night, every stomach ache, headache, knee ache, every sneeze and cough, literally everything. And when you do that, you come to the inevitable conclusion that things are not functioning as smoothly as you once thought.

The Logic Behind Real Food

My book looks at logic as fundamental to decision making. I'm interested in logic not only as a tool for deriving truths and rejecting misperceptions, but also as a force of nature that drives human ideation. Our ability to practice logic is intimately tied to our neurobiology. As such, it is vulnerable, fallible, and malleable. But, when harnessed correctly, can be powerful. 

The Abounding Fallacy

The most common logical fallacy in evolutionary interpretation is the naturalistic fallacy, which states that something is 'natural, therefore good' or 'unnatural, therefore bad'. We know there are natural things that are bad, and unnatural things that are good. Exploring nature is a great first step, but appealing to nature in argument is illogical. 

The Mismatch Hypothesis

At the center of the world of ancestral health is the mismatch hypothesis, sometimes called the discordance hypothesis, which states generally that there is a mismatch between our genes (the way we evolved) and our modern lives (the way we live), and that this mismatch can detract from human potential in various ways (but not all ways!). 

Some figureheads fear taking this idea too far. They steer away from the argument that our ancestors were healthy due to their diets. While they concede that our ancestors were in fact healthier than the average modern person in nearly every way, they point out that we can't really say why. Chris Kresser and Mat LaLonde, although proponents of paleolithic/ancestral dieting, both argue that diet and health in this case are simply correlates and therefore do not demonstrate a causal relationship. But how accurate is that?

Evolutionary theory is so well-supported that it would be unreasonable to not accept as fact. So it is therefore reasonable to extract what we can from evolutionary theory. If we know that nature selects for traits that provide an evolutionary advantage, and we know that our ancestors were healthy in various ways (relatively disease-free, physically fit, etc.), what else might we reasonably be able to conclude? 

Evolution teaches us that animals adapt to their environments. Inevitably, their biological and psychological systems reach a balance between the pressures of the environment and the necessity of survival and reproduction. Our ancestors certainly were not in perfect health due to this balance. They were, though, much healthier than the average Westerner today.

Evolution also teaches us that the health of our ancestors must have been due to their lifestyle, a lifestyle that evolved according to the dictates of the environment. Therefore, interpreting the elements of their lifestyles that promoted health may help us unravel why and how they reached a natural set point in health.

We already know the important lifestyle elements that contribute or detract from health: exercise, sleep, etc. Above all, diet is almost universally regarded as the most important factor in health. So it stands to reason that, in all probability, it was the diet of our ancestors that contributed most to their health from an evolutionary perspective.

Saying that diet and health are mere correlates is unreasonable given what we know about evolution. The health that our ancestors achieved, while not perfect but still superior, must have been due to their lifestyles, and most principally due to what they consumed (namely, foods available in the wild).

This may not seem like firm ground to stand on. Indeed, we are operating within the realm of logic, not science. But logic is a check and balance for science. It complements science and strategy and helps us to make decisions.

I argue that this logical progression leaves us with something big, because it demonstrates the logic behind eating real food. Real food is good for us because of evolution. It's not good because its 'real'. It's not good because it's natural. It's good for us because humans evolved to eat foods available in the wild. This is something that mainstream people like Micheal Pollan don't seem to emphasize in their literature (for obvious political/sales/marketing reasons). However, I will emphasize that, because it is the truth.

A Book by Yours Truly

Just a sliver of the mountain of evolutionary literature.

I can't help but feel a sense of serendipity about the course of my life as of late. Everything seems to have aligned in just the right way. I've been given the chance to become a part of something bigger than myself, something with the potential to really help others, and, hence, something rife with purpose and meaning. I am, of course, referring to my book about the growing movement called ancestral health.

Years ago, I stumbled on this idea that evolution had answers for societal problems. It enveloped me. Little did I know at the time that the rabbit hole went deep, but I nevertheless scoured the topic voraciously. I read everything I could, interpreted every idea, and talked to anyone who would listen. For years I did this.

Then I reached a tipping point. I had put in my 10,000 hours, so to speak, and I felt hungry for more. I was ready to take the next step, to 'go pro', as they say. Luckily, my passion aligned neatly with circumstances that enabled me to write the book and become a bona fide entrepreneur.

When I discovered ancestral health, it had no name. It was just a sloppy idea thrown around with words like 'paleo'. But I latched on, framing the ideas within evolutionary theory. I learned about diet, then exercise, then sleep, and there is where the road began to fade and split. Ancestral health still had so far to go, but the rest of the way had yet to be paved. There was still important work to be done in educating others and expanding the lens of evolution. I realized that I just might be the man for the job.

This is what drove me to write the book. I wanted to unite the ideas before me and expand them into a cohesive format to present to people. I wanted something that someone could pick up and go, "Wow, evolution makes sense of everything." I wanted a strong brand free from the caveman gimmicks. I wanted to wrap everything up in a neat little bow and give it to the world. So that's my challenge, my dutiful project, what will be my greatest achievement. I just hope you like it.