Reasons of my own

I'll admit that I was initially skeptical about the Paleo diet when Crystal started talking about it. I remember thinking, "How is throwing away thousands of years of agricultural advances going to make me healthy?" Still, I try to support Crystal in whatever she does, so I opened my ears and closed my mouth. (Ok, I snickered a little bit too, but I blame the Y chromosome for that.) I had always taken for granted that the purpose of cooking food is to make it more nutritious and easier to digest. Never did it occur to me that the reason some foods are more nutritious and digestible is because they're poisonous in raw form! As I read more about the theory and science behind the diet I became more convinced that it might be just the thing for our health. Now, I am lucky not to suffer from any sort of autoimmune disease, but I do have a family history of diabetes, heart disease and cancer, all of which I would prefer to avoid contracting.

Avoiding the negative is a powerful motivation in itself, but going Paleo seems likely to give me a boost in one of my most passionate pursuits: practicing martial arts. I study Kung Fu under the Shaolin Do system and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under the Carlson Gracie system, and I am always trying to improve my abilities. I wasn't always a good steward of my body, and I've spent the last two years making up for it. No matter what I do, though, I cannot get rid of this band of belly fat that prevents me from doing the more acrobatic moves gracefully. Also, it doesn't help that conditioning workouts often cause me to go into hypoglycemic shock. I'm hoping that the proponents of the diet are right when they say that it helps to reduce belly fat and regulate blood sugar.