A Tree-Climbing Modern-Caveman's Secrets To Living Ancestrally In A Modern World.

In this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

For my phone, I don't ever have the ringer on. I kind of keep it on vibrate. I notice within myself, and you may have a similar experience, but I can perceive stress in my body pretty well. I know when I kind of flip that fight or flight switch, you know, you can kind of feel yourself getting a little jacked up. And I notice every time the phone rings, ah, gotta get to the phone. A little bit of fight or flight. Let's say you're getting the correct wavelength of light exposure, you know, blue light during the day and maybe orange or yellow as you kind of get along a little bit later. So you're doing those kind of big checklist items. I think we're gonna start to more and more into the role of electromagnetic radiation in health.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And I have a photo in the show notes for today's episode, which you can check out over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tony that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com T O N Y and there's a guy in the photo, he's climbing a tree, kind of like an ancient ape with his arms and legs wrapped around the tree. And his name is Tony Federico. He's actually my guest on today's show. He's one of the leaders of the Paleo movement. I met him a few years ago at the Paleo FX conference. He does a lot in that community, like he hosts the Paleo Magazine radio podcast. He's the editor of Paleo Fitness magazine. He's the author of a book called Immodern Caveman's Guide to Cooking with Fire. And he's also a full time personal trainer who's been working in the fitness industry for over a decade now. Tony and I today are going to be talking about little known ways that you actually can live in a more ancestral way, even if you're in a modern world. And as a good point to jump into, I just found out that Tony finished Moving into his house and in the process of moving into a new place, has a bunch of newfangled things hanging around his office. So, Tony, I want to dive into that stuff. But first, welcome to today's show.

Yeah, thanks for having me, man. It's my pleasure.

So I know that you and I have some similar interests when it comes to living ancestry. Like, just before we started recording, I had recorded a podcast episode just prior to this and took a break to go hang from the monkey bars in my little gym next door and just swing back and forth and release some tension in the fingertips, open up the arms, decompress the back and do all those things to fight against staring at a computer screen and a microphone for an hour.

Not paleo.

Yeah, exactly. Well, one part of it isn't quite paleo, and the other part is the swinging from the monkey bars. So I don't necessarily think everybody needs to be climbing up into trees to collect their own coconuts barefoot. But I am curious, when you move into a new house and you're unpacking all these boxes, what some of the things are that are scattered around your office that you're using?

Oh, man. The whole thing about moving, it's just such an interesting process. And I think it does speak to something deeply rooted in our evolution, our desire to make a home, make a nest, make a place. And going from one place to another, there's that transition zone where you don't have a home. And that is kind of where we've been. We've been living in that place for the past couple weeks between our apartment and where we are now, which is an actual house. We upgraded a little bit, got a little bit more space. And this past weekend, as I mentioned before, is the great unboxing and finally getting some stuff set up and making this place our own. You know, one of the first things that I did, obviously the kitchen, number one, you got to eat in the bed. Number two, you got to sleep. But number three was getting my office set up. And the way that I have my office set up, and I can send you a picture of this as well. It's about as minimalist as I can go. It's a stand up desk that I got from Wayfair.com and I don't remember the exact name of it, but it only has the stand option, so it's very affordable. I've got my podcasting mic keyboard monitor. Right above the monitor is a daylight lamp to help kind of trigger a positive entrainment with circadian rhythms.

What do you mean like a daylight lamp? It produces blue light, right? Okay. Do you have a brand that you use?

It's actually called daylight.

Daylight lamp.

Literally, it's the daylight lamp.

Gotcha. Okay, cool.

But I had been dealing with some chronic low back pain for a couple years now and really can draw a pretty tight correlation between the amount of time I spent sitting and how bad my back felt. So for me, it wasn't just sort of this theoretical, hey, if I stand while I work or podcast or whatever, I'm going to get some benefit down the road. It's an immediate term, I feel better today type of thing. You know, it's, it's something that I've done with my office at work as well. As you mentioned, I'm a personal trainer by day. I'm actually the director of a small facility and there's a lot of administrative stuff when you actually have to run the books and know where every single dollar is going. And so sitting on a computer working on spreadsheets just wasn't happening. So I talked to the HR department and they foot, they footed the bill to get a little stand up desk converter. And that one's called a stand steady. So it's kind of like a little, almost looks like a little kids table that you set right up on top of a standard desk. So I got the standing setup both at work and at home.

Is that based on the similar concept as like a varidesk, where it's a stand up setup that attaches to a desktop or a table or something like that so that you could sit or stand.

This one, in theory, it's adjustable, but this is pretty much, you know, you're kind of committing to whatever height you're kind of dialing it into. You know, really just kind of a price point issue. You can obviously get something that's got a nice little, you know, adjuster. But this one, I was like, you know what? If I need to sit down, I will, but as a rule, I'm going to stand up.

Okay. So if you're not going to alternate between like a seated and a standing position at the same workstation, this stand steady is a good, good one to use.

Yeah, very affordable.

Okay.

I mean, the great thing about being a trainer is that I'm out there with clients demoing exercises. So I'm going to get a lunge, I'm going to have an opportunity to hang. Like you were saying, get a little hang time in there. I'm going to be down on the ground squatting. So full grok squat while someone's kind of dispensing some instruction or kind of guiding somebody through an exercise. So I get a lot of varied movements throughout the day, but I still felt like I was overdosing on sitting as a movement pattern. And I really think that the standup option helps kind of break that up. There's going to be some inevitable sitting throughout the day unless you're walking to and from work, which I don't have the luxury of doing. You know, I'm not going to do that on the interstate and potentially get hit by a car and check out of life in general. Yeah, it really just seems to be working a lot better. Getting more stand time.

I want to ask you a little bit more about some of the things in your office, but is there any real evidence that people have not always sat at some point?

I guess what you're saying is sitting normal and it's just maybe we're kind of doing it wrong.

Oh, when I'm in the woods camping, you sit around the campfire, you don't stand around the campfire. Right.

Right. Now, I think that this all comes down to kind of the phrase the dose makes the poison. And if you think about people today, we're sitting at work, we're sitting in the car, we're sitting on the couch. I don't think that there's anything intrinsically wrong with sitting as an occasional moment of respite or relaxation. I think that, you know, we should be able to sit comfortably. But I think when you sit in any one position or if you stand all day, for example, if anything done to excess is going to cause problems. And I think that that's really where we get tripped up. It's not that sitting is intrinsically wrong as a, as a movement pattern. We're just overdosing on it.

Yeah, that's the way I think about it. I don't think that our ancestors would have been so dumb that they wouldn't have gotten tired legs and sat down on the ground or even fashioned a chair. It's just that because of frankly everything that's been invented in a post industrial era that allows us to be productive and to make money and to put food on the table when we're sitting has just made it a lot simpler to sit all day.

Exactly.

So you've got your daylight lamp, you've got this stand steady desk. What are some of the other things you unboxed?

Well, I think beyond just products looking at orientation, I have myself situated so I'm looking out a Window, you know, so I've got the daylight lamp, but I also have actual light, you know, and I'm able to see grass and I'm able to see trees.

That's very important, and I think it's important. A lot of people think it's important for just the light. Right. Or the ability to see green in nature. One of the things that I find is most important because I'm looking out my window right now. I've got trees that are close, trees that are far, a mountain that's close, a mountain that's far, rocks, like, literally feet outside my window. But it's for the eyes, right? Like, I can take my eyes off the screen and readjust, you know, every few minutes to make sure that I don't basically develop some kind of myopia or, you know, optic problem from staring at a computer all day.

Absolutely. I mean, the muscles in your eye that control where you're focusing just, like, sitting down too much over the course of the day. If you're focused at the same distance all day, you're going to have issues with your eyes. I think that there's absolutely a visual component or visual health component to being able to stare off into the distance. I can't imagine our ancestors were looking at things at arm's length eight, nine, ten hours a day.

No. When you go hunting, like, have you ever. Have you ever glassed when you've been hunting?

I'm not familiar with that phrase. I have gone hunting, though.

Glassing is when you're using binoculars to scan the landscape. And sometimes you'll do this for three or four hours in a row, looking for whatever, an elk or a mule deer or something else that happens to be blended into the environment. Your eyes hurt by the end of the day, I mean, because you're using them so much. But at the same time, it's a different hurt than when you're staring at a computer all day.

Interesting.

It's the same as if whatever. You're sitting all day and your low back hurts, versus you're hiking and moving and gardening all day and your low back hurts. It's because you've been using the muscle in a very productive way versus just overusing it in one specific movement pattern. Does that make sense?

Interesting. Absolutely. I mean, I've definitely had the experience out hunting where I've seen deer where there was no deer.

Yeah, yeah.

Kind of the hunter's hallucination.

Yeah, exactly. But I think that that kind of keys into this important idea that the trick is, like you mentioned the dose is in the poison. And the trick is to use the muscles in a variety of ways, whether it's the eye muscles or the other muscles, and not just one single way all day long. Because you could probably also look out your window at a tree or whatever and just stare at that same tree all long, trying to be ancestral or whatever and really just kind of get atrophy of your eye muscles because you're not using them.

Exactly. And I think that's a big thing and we'll probably talk about this later, but the same thing for food and all these other ancestral concepts and lifestyle components. Because I live in the real world, I'm in the trenches with clients each and every day. People who've never read a book about Paleo or paleo blog, they're working, they're raising families, they're doing their thing. And nothing against that, but you have to kind of take everything in perspective when you're trying to bring people along this path. And if you say, all right, right now you got to stop, you know, you can't ever sit down, you can't ever look at a computer, you can't ever eat a piece of bread ever again in the rest of your life, you're just not going to get any sort of buy in with that kind of message. So I think that it's important to kind of keep that in mind. And it's all about the balance.

Ultimately, in a little bit I want to get into more home and office modifications. But just stepping back a minute, how'd you get interested in this whole concept? And the reason I ask that is I know a lot of people in the fitness industry. I spend a lot of time at fitness conferences and in many cases it is Nautilus machines and done for you, protein shakes. So what kind of drew you out of that?

I'm going to throw something a little bit different and I don't know, tell me if you've heard this one before. The Ranger Rick dinosaur book? No, my mom had bought us a subscription back when we were kids and Ranger Rick was sort of like a naturalist sort of, you know, he was a little, I don't know, raccoon or something like that. But then they had this series of books and it was all about dinosaurs and it showed different related types of dinosaurs and different groups. And there is the, the book on kind of the ancient mammals. So you have all these different types of elephants and all these different types of rhinoceroses and you see that they're living in America and. And you start to see as a child, or at least I did as a child, this continuity of life and this development of life and this evolution of life and how things change over time. And I also had the great joy as a kid to live on a lake. And we had a giant tree in the backyard. And it was at a time when video games were really kind of a rare commodity. I actually had to save up money for years. It wasn't until I was kind of a kid and kind of a little more grown that I bought a Nintendo for myself. And even then the use of it was, was highly regulated by my parents. So most of my day was out climbing that tree was out on the bank of that lake. And when you catch a tadpole and you see the little tadpole with the little leg buds starting to come in, and then eventually you see the little tiny frogs jumping up on the shoreline, you can't help but really absorb this concept or this idea, which really isn't even an idea, it's evolution in action. You see it right before your eyes. You see these things changing right before your eyes. How would that not be what makes sense or the governing law or rule? And so I think that there's an early love for biology on a practical observational, getting your hands dirty, literally, sense of watching these little creatures and seeing myself as kind of joining their environment in the tree or in the water or down on the shoreline. And that's really where it came from. And so that was the seed that years down the road after I had gone through kind of the traditional narrative journey or the cycle of eating crappy food and not working out and not being in shape to eventually coming into exercise and coming into the standard fitness sort of paradigm. That's why when I first ran into Paleo eight, seven, eight years into being a full time personal trainer and being in the fitness industry, immediately it just clicked and immediately it made sense.

So you kind of grew up that way. That's similar to me. I grew up homeschooled on 6 acres of land and I'd finish school by 11 and just go play outside all day long. And even though I did for a short period of time get sucked into hammer strength machines and the indoor gym setting and bodybuilding and ABB protein shakes and all this other stuff, stuff that is more of a man made fitness construct that tends to keep us indoors in darkly lit gyms, sucking chemicals into our body all day long, I got disillusioned with that pretty fast. And now, similar to you, I do a lot of my workouts and everything outside, spend a lot of time in nature and try to marry ancestral living and ancestral fitness principles in a modern world. So as far as your own health, along the way you ran into some issues, right?

Totally. And I think running is an appropriate word that you just used. Going back a little bit, I definitely spent my time, like you were saying, in the dark, dimly lit gyms, the Gold's Gym and things like that. I had the subscription of Flex magazine and Muscle Media and was really entranced by the bodybuilding world for a few years. But once I kind of got into working in a gym and working as a trainer and got out of high school and got a little bit older, I was more in the functional, quote unquote world. And of course that meant at the time people are balancing on stability balls and BOSU balls and everything's just kind of almost like stupid human tricks in some regards. But at least there's a movement in that direction towards multi planner, multi joint exercises. And so that was kind of when I was coming up and Paul Check's doing his thing and putting some information out there and people were getting on board with that. But I was trying to be, trying my best to be in the pursuit of fitness. And what I understood fitness to be at that time was your ability to run a marathon or to do something along those lines. And I realized I had the ability to push myself pretty hard mentally. I, I felt like I could set my mind to something and put one foot in front of the other and just kind of go. So I was like, you know what? I'm going to give this endurance running thing a shot and train for a marathon. Well, of course my knee hurt right from the get go and of course I didn't stop and didn't adjust and didn't change because I was like, well, your knees are supposed to hurt. There's just going to be breakdown and pain and you just got to push through it. You got to be mentally tough. So that was kind of my, my perspective. But of course it started hurting worse and worse and worse and I got through the training program. So, you know, I hit my 20 mile training run and it was for the Chicago Marathon. And this is going back quite some time. I don't exactly remember the year, probably, you know, 2009, 2008, somewhere around there. But I realized my knee was screwed. And you know, I saw enough people at the gym who had had bad knees. You know, I didn't want to be the old guy at the gym with his knee wrapped up. You know, hobbling around, I'm like, all right, I'm going to shut it down. I'm going to do some multi planar stretching. I'm going to do some single leg exercises. I'm going to do my lunges. I'm going to get this thing fixed. Didn't work. Didn't work, didn't work. A year goes by, you know, I'm going for a run with my wife. About 100 meters into it. I have to stop. My knee's killing me. I'm like, this is ridiculous. At this point, it's hurting when I'm standing, it's hurting when I'm sitting is hurting all the time. And my option was go to a doctor, have them do something to it, shoot it with cortisone or who knows what. Or I could try something else. And for me, that something else was, hey, I remember one of my trainer co workers wearing these ridiculous shoes that had little pockets for the toes. I was like, I wonder what was up with that. I wonder if this is something that might help my knee. So I start looking into it. Oh, these are Vibram Five Fingers. Okay, looking into it a little bit more now. People are having some good resolution to back pain and knee pain and things like that. It can't hurt to try it. I'm going to buy some Vibrams. So I get a pair. Within literally one day, my feet felt better. And within three months, the knee pain that I was experiencing, which was probably like an 8 or a 9, was down to like a 5 or a 6. And then another three months after that, it's down to like a 2 or a 3. And so I wasn't even running at that point. It's just wearing Vibram five fingers to work. And I was working in a gym, so I was able to do that. Not everybody might have that luxury, but I was able to do that. And it made such a huge difference. That was probably one of the first things that really kind of shook up my conventional thinking in the fitness space, because I was like, wait a minute. The problem wasn't that my body's bad. The problem is that the equipment was bad. The equipment's arbitrarily designed by a company that's trying to make money. What do they know about me? And what do they know about the forces that my body should be experiencing every time my foot strikes the ground? Is Nike that good? And I don't think that they are. I don't think any company is or ever will be. I think our foot is Designed exactly the way that it should be for what our body expects, which is to be walking barefoot.

Depends on who you ask. I wouldn't go down to Portland, Oregon and start saying that you might get in big trouble.

Well, for me, and I'll put that in there. For me, it was, it was a huge eye opening experience and the level of pain that I was experiencing compared to the level of relief that I was experiencing was a big, big selling point and really kind of helped me turn a corner in terms of my own health. I can run now. Did a half marathon, you know, just a couple weekends ago, felt great. Knee pain, not even an issue. So for me, that's what it always kind of seems to be. It's, I kind of go forward, forward, forward, push, push, push, push, hit a wall, get hurt, get injured. And then I'm like, do I go see the doctor or do I try something else? And inevitably that something else is one of these ancestral solutions, whether it's Vibram five fingers or standing desk, or in the case of my binge eating, which I dealt with for a long time, it's a paleo diet. So I've been able to manage a lot of my health issues without having to participate in the conventional medical world. And so far, so good.

Okay, got it. Interesting. So you basically have all of these different ways that you try to simulate like a hunter gatherer lifestyle or like an ancestral lifestyle into your daily modern environment. And some people will say, you know, how do you know, like how do you know how, how our ancestors lived? How do you know that you're simulate simulating their lifestyle when you're using anything from like a daylight lamp to a, to a standing desk to that type of thing? Do you have specific like resources, study materials, ideas that you rely upon to kind of help you to understand what would be considered ancestral versus what wouldn't be?

You know, I think a great resource, and one that interestingly enough isn't really discussed a lot in the paleo world, is some of the textbooks that are out there on evolutionary biology. There's great courses, that's the brand name, great courses that you can, I think you can get them on audible now and listen to a course on evolutionary biology, or listen to a course on human evolution, or listen to a course on anthropology and just the technological changes that we've experienced as a species. And I think that those resources are so rich and so full of information, but they're generally created by people that don't have very much of an interest in taking it To a practical lifestyle level. They're exploring the past, they're exploring history. And then it's kind of left to people such as you and I to take that information and to test it out and to apply it. And so for me, that was really one of the best things that I did was we were living in Orlando at one point, and I had an hour commute to work, and so I would go to the library and I would check out these books on tape, and I'd listen for an hour to an evolutionary biology course on the way to and from work. And you start doing that over the course of a year, you know, you're racking up some serious brain time with some of these concepts. And I think what you see is that consistently, human beings lived as hunter gatherers in a variety of environments, but with very little reliance on anything that we would call technology. I mean, you know, a spear was a technological advance, fire was a technological advance, you know. So I don't know, I don't know how you could not expect for species to have spent 90% of its time on this planet adapting a very specific way, just like every other animal on this earth, and then to dramatically change it. I mean, you see the problems zoo animals get when they're put into confinement. They don't even mate. You know, they have so much trouble with the pandas because they can't get them to breed with each other when they're in confinement, you know, and you start to think, well, maybe that's where some of the problems are with human beings. And even in human sexuality, it's like we're breeding in confinement or trying to breed in confinement. So it's just one of those things where it really only makes sense that we would have issues living in boxes, driving to and from work, socializing in ways that are completely atypical. We're outside of our tribal environment. We're outside of our kind of close knit kin groups, which is really where we spent most of our evolutionary time. So we're just dealing with a lot of pressures, a lot of stresses. It's interesting, I remember hearing something about how when the Romans first implemented their series of roads, people were kind of thrown for a loop at how quickly things were moving in their lives and how big of a disruption and how disruptive the technology of roads were. You know, and then you think about what kind of changes have you and I experienced in our lifetimes? I remember before, you know, we didn't have cell phones when I was a kid. I remember my dad's first cell phone was like that giant white, you know, looking like a military thing that Zach had on Saved by the Bell.

Yeah. Huge antenna in the car. Yeah.

You know, so from cell phones to smartphones to the Internet, all that stuff's happening in our lifetimes. And these are huge changes. So, you know, of course, we're gonna have trouble adapting to that. And I think what we're seeing is, you know, a lot of problems are the result of it.

So I want to ask you in just a second here about how we can mitigate some of these issues, you know, from like, water to EMF to living indoors, et cetera. But one resource that I would say is particularly helpful in terms of looking at everything from how gorillas lived and animals and zoos adapt to the zoos, as well as why the Bible is obsessed with hygiene and how Paleolithic skulls appear with beautiful sets of teeth, et cetera, is this book, Paleo Manifesto by John Durant. I think that that's like a good palatable book when it comes to. To laying out some pretty cool ancestral principles that mimic what our ancestors would have done, from diet to movement to sleep, et cetera. So that one, I think, is kind of an interesting one. I don't personally agree with everything that John has to say, but I do agree with quite a bit of what's in that book. So in terms of some of the things that you're doing, Tony, jumping into brass tacks here, for example, we talked about a few of the things that you do in the office. I want to talk a little bit about sleep. What do you do personally to mimic the type of sleep conditions that our ancestors would have been exposed to?

I think the most important thing. And, you know, again, I'm coming from an environment where I talk to people every day who have televisions in their bedrooms. The TV's literally on almost all night. So I'm trying to meet them in the middle with some of these kind of recommendations. And even in my own life, I'm doing the best that I can. A modern caveman, if you will, trying to do the best they can in a modern world, but first and foremost, have some sort of routine. I talk to so many people who don't treat sleep as a thing that they have to prepare for. For example, if you're going to go on a run, most people know, all right, might have to do a little flexibility, might have to do some sort of warm up. I'm going to have to put on, you know, whatever shoes, minimalist or otherwise. I'M going to wear a particular outfit. There's a process and there's this kind of cascade or this series of events that plays out. And as soon as you start that process, you're now in the mode, I'm getting ready for a run, I'm getting ready for a run, I'm getting ready for a run. And then you go do it. So many people don't have any sort of routine when it comes to their sleep. They just sort of hope that sleep happens every night. And I don't remember exactly who said this, but I heard recently the quote that hope isn't a good strategy. And I believe that that's true. I think that that's a really poor strategy. Just lay down and hope that you're going to fall asleep. So having some sort of routine, whether that's reading a book before bed, taking a warm bath before bed, for me, it is taking my melatonin supplement. You know, about an hour before I am going to go to sleep, I start turning off the lights around the house. So I'm shutting the lights down about when the sun's also going down, stopping my work for the day. So not inputting additional emails or, you know, whatever to do. List items at a certain point again, about when the sun's going down naturally, you know, turn the air conditioning down a little bit, kind of cool things down, you know, so all of these things kind of start rolling me into, I'm going to go to sleep, I'm going to go to sleep, I'm going to go to sleep. And you know, that for me is the most important thing is just having that routine and just playing it out and treating my body in some ways like you would a kid or a dog or any other animal. And it's like, hey, there's a Pavlovian response. If you do this and this and this, you're going to get this. So I think that that's the biggest thing. And, you know, lately I've been thinking about some other kind of components, like, oh, maybe I should unplug my wifi router and put my cell phone into airplane mode so I don't have, you know, I'm not getting blasted with EMF at night or what am I doing during the day. Am I really packing in a lot of socialization and kind of human interaction during the day? Am I getting hot during the day? Am I making sure to exercise during the day? I feel like that's almost as important as what you do at night, is what you do during the Day, because it's not just what you do at night. It's a part of a bigger process.

So if I could play devil's advocate here a little bit, you take melatonin, obviously our ancestors probably didn't take melatonin. Like, there were some plant, plant extracts and essential oils and things like that that they used, but it's unlikely they had access to basically synthetic melatonin. How is it that you justify taking that? And are you concerned about, like, shutting down your own endogenous production or anything along those lines versus using something like, let's say, lemon balm tea or something that might be considered more ancestral?

Yeah, you know, that's something I've certainly considered. But for me, at this point right now, and it's not like I, you know, if I don't have melatonin, for example, am I still going to do all my other stuff? Am I still going to go to sleep? Yes. But for me, it's part of my process. And, you know, I think getting that solid night's sleep, I'm going to. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that that outweighs the potential negative of becoming slightly dependent on something that my body's naturally producing. Is it ancestral? No, because they were living outside and they didn't have fluorescent light bulbs at night. So there's some accommodations similar to how. I think it'd be great if we could be sitting down in the same room having this conversation. But you're in Washington and I'm in Florida, so there's going to be a little bit of concession made, I guess. And for me, that sleep routine, it's working. I sleep deeply. I feel like I'm getting the sleep quality that I need to be recovered to really take on a very high level of just kind of activity throughout the day. And I'm taking that educated risk, I guess, of potentially shutting down some endogenous production, which is probably happening anytime you add something in. Just like if you were to take testosterone or pick some sort of other substance your body produces. Yeah. There's going to be some feedback loops that are interfered there.

And then also as far as turning things down at night, I mean, sure, the sun might set it at 6 or 7 or 8, depending on the time of year, but if you start shutting things down that early, living in our modern world, you're missing out on a ton of everything from social activities. Like I play tennis and my tennis club doesn't start till 7:30pm at night. Or you're missing out On a lot of times, like dinners, social activities, things like that. Do you really shut everything down at 6 or 7 or 8, if that's when the sun goes down, Even if you're not, you know, camping or whatever.

Five days a week at least. Wow.

So in your house, like, if, like if it's winter and it's 6pm you just pretty much shut everything off? Or do you. Do you wear like blue light blocking glasses and keep some things on or what? How do you, how are you productive or how are you living a modern life if you're shutting things down at 6pm?

Well, I've got F Lux installed on the computer, so if I do go on there, it's at least warming the display up a little bit, so I'm not getting as much blue light exposure. And I think it's all about just kind of a gradual process. So it's not, you know, I'm flipping the master switch and, you know, telling my wife, you know, this is it. We're not, you know, we're not having any more conversations about anything today. You know, it's just about getting that process going. So whether it's turning off some of the lights, cooling down the house, putting the phone off to the side, you know, that kind of thing. It's not a hard, hard rule that if somebody calls or if my mom calls or something like that, I'm not going to talk to her. Of course I'm going to do that. But generally, if I'm being productive with my time during the day or if I'm being smart with my time during the day, I can get everything that I need to get done during the day. For me, it's almost a way to focus my efforts, my energies during those active hours. And then that way I can have at least a few hours to just relax and give myself some time to not be just churning and turning the wheels and getting my mind going. Because, I mean, you know how it is, man. Multiple podcasts, websites, you know, coaching clients, family obligations, you know, there's always, you know, future ideas, wanting to change the world, all this stuff. I mean, there's enough to occupy one human brain for multiple lifetimes. And at a certain point, you just got to say, enough's enough. I'm gonna, I'm gonna pick this up tomorrow.

Yeah, my approach is a little bit different. I tend to just because my kids and I and my wife, we have all these activities late into the evening. Like tonight I'll be at boxing, and again tomorrow I'll be at tennis. And then the next night, Wednesday nights, I'm forgetting what I have going. Oh, Wednesday night I'll be on a freaking airplane walking through an airport. So what I do generally is I have learned to cope with the fact that evening activities are just a fact of modern life. But I have a very protected nap time every day from about 1 until 2pm or so. I have kind of like you have an evening routine. I have a like a pre nap. I take a few adaptogenic herbs to wind me down. I have lunch, I lay out a mat on the bed or sometimes a hammock outside, I put on my sleep mask. And that's just my time. It comes back to bite me sometimes. If I'm doing like an Ironman triathlon and one or two o' clock rolls around, that's about the time the marathon starts during an Ironman and that's about the time I've trained my body to fall asleep. So it comes back to bite me sometimes. But that's kind of my approach. Is I just a nap? Because I could go to bed at 6 or 7 or 8 and then just stay up the entire next day. But I find that there's too much going on at night a lot of the times for me to pull it off. And I do agree with a lot of the things that you're using, like the Flux app and I use the blue light blocking glasses and keep any blue lights off in the house, things like that. So we talked about your office a little bit, your standing workstation and that light that you use. Are there other things that you do like with your computer or with your phone or with your work habits when it comes to electricity or EMF or some of those things?

Well, I think, and this might not exactly be what you're kind of getting at, but for my phone, I don't ever have the ringer on. I kind of keep it on vibrate. I notice within myself and I don't know if. And you may have a similar experience, but I can perceive stress in my body pretty well. I know when I kind of flip that fight or flight switch, you know, you can kind of feel yourself getting a little jacked up. And I notice that every time the phone rings, gotta get to the phone a little bit of fight or flight. So one of the things that I just always do, it's on vibrate. I'll check my messages from time to time. You know, it's kind of like I think I emailed you and I noticed that you had an email message. You're like, you know, I'm only answering emails between here and here and here and here, you know, so be prepared to wait a little bit. So that's kind of how I treat my phone. I don't feel like I should be constantly at the beck and call of anybody who has my phone number. Granted, I might wish that I had my ringer on if there was a serious emergency, but at the same time, 99% of the time, it's not. So should I allow that telemarketer or whoever else might be calling me to jack up my cortisol levels unnecessarily? I'm gonna say no. So that's one of the things that I do. I think houseplants are really kind of a good addition to anybody's workspace. Something alive, basically. You know, obviously you have air quality issues inside of a house. You know, we have paint and glues. You know, I was unboxing some, you know, some furniture, and I was kind of looking at one of the little labels, and I was like, oh, meets such and such regulation for formaldehyde outgassing. So I'm like, oh, that's great. So that's. That's coming out, you know, so get some living things in your environment.

Yep.

You know, maybe a fish or something.

I agree. And NASA actually has this fascinating plant study that they've done where there are specific plants. If you can. You can Google the NASA Clean Air Study. And there are specific plants that they have identified as mitigating or removing things like benzene and formaldehyde, and a lot of these trichloroethylenes from the air. We have them scattered all over our house because my wife did an article on this for. For our website. And in writing the article, I looked at our. For some reason, our. I think it was our grocery or utilities expense was way higher that month. And it's because she went out and bought a bunch of plants like. Like a dozen different plants. Chinese evergreen and devil's ivy and peace lily. And these plants are all over our house. It's like a little jungle. But it's fascinating how much of the air you can clean up with a little step like that. But if anybody gets a chance, check out that NASA clean air study. Because I love that tip, Tony, about the plants. It's one that a lot of people don't utilize. What about any of these you use, like, a negative ion generator or any of these things that you plug into the wall or.

I haven't gone down that path yet. I think that when we start looking at potential for, you know, so, so let's say you're standing up. Let's say you're, you're, you're getting the correct wavelength of light exposure, you know, blue light during the day and maybe, you know, orange or yellow as you kind of get along a little bit later, you know, so you're, you're doing those kind of big checklist items. You know, I think we're going to start to get more and more into the role of electromagnetic radiation and health just because, man, I can't imagine when I was looking at the WI FI speeds, I did a little WI FI connection test a couple days ago because again, we just moved in and Comcast finally got around to hooking us up on the Internet. And I'm looking at this, I'm like, okay, so the Wi Fi 5 megabytes, second upload and whatever download, that's a lot of information floating around in the air. So we're just bathing in that. And I think that we're going to start to find that that's a big issue. And then obviously we have our WI FI hotspots everywhere. So my kind of next phase of modifications is going to address that. And as a first pass, it's airplane mode on the phone at night so that I'm not baking myself with the phone. The alarm function still works. That's really the most important thing. And then unplugging the, the Internet, which is a pretty easy thing to do, just pull some out of the plug. It's like, I'm not going to be up in the middle of the night surfering on YouTube. Anyway, as we discussed before, I don't want to have the light exposure. You know, I guess I could throw on some blue locking, blue light blocking glasses, but you know, I'm not using the Internet in the middle of night. I don't need to be bathing in local WI FI signals, you know. So I think that there's a lot there actually was talking to somebody the other day, and this is kind of an interesting thing. Natural fibers versus unnatural fibers, and I guess you call them synthetic fibers and garments. So starting to think, well, hey, maybe there might be some interference there as well to just our own kind of body field using some of these synthetic fibers. But that's a path that I'm just starting to go down personally. And I think I've been able to achieve some pretty good results for myself doing the big checklist items standing up, you know, getting the light dialed in to continue that process and keep Getting better. I think this is some good uncharted or less charted territory.

Yeah. If we, if we look at, at our ancestors, a lot of times people did stick to these natural fibers, right. Like wool and cashmere and silk and even hemp leather. Right. And you compare that to like rayon or polyester or nylon, and those actually contain a lot of different synthetic polymers that are made from like alcohols and acids. I mean like rayon. Rayon is treated with ammonia and sulfuric acid and acetone. Nylon, for example, is actually made from petroleum.

Exactly.

So I, yeah, I sleep on all natural fabrics. I try to get natural synthetics or natural synthetic stuff, natural fibers when I can. When you hear me talk about, you know, sometimes on this podcast we'll get sponsors, you know, who are clothing sponsors and I'll, I'll turn them down if it's, if it's synthetic fiber based stuff. But yeah, yeah, that's, that's a huge one that flies under the radar. It may seem annoying to a lot of people, but yeah, if the majority of your of your wardrobe can be wool, cashmere, cotton, silk, linen, hemp, or just straight up, you know, like leather. I'm not quite sure you want to be wearing mink furs or something like that. You gotta be careful where you go out these days wearing mink furs. But yeah, I completely agree.

Yeah, you might, you might piss off somebody from PETA.

I want to ask you a couple other questions, Tony. The first is you're a personal trainer. You're obviously immersed in fitness. I'm curious what you would consider to be some of the more ancestral forms of movement or exercise out there in.

Terms of like methodologies. Like if we're talking like CrossFit or.

Movenat or something like that, methodologies or even what you found to work for you, even if it doesn't have a name.

Yeah. You know, so if we're looking at, again, like, if we're looking at method, methodologies in a pure sense, I think what Erwan Lacour has done with movenet is that's pretty awesome systemized human movement. So that's growing.

That's called movenat.

Yeah, just mov n a t. So, you know, throwing, fighting, you know, balance, just kind of taking these different movement domains and really kind of breaking it out into a way that's teachable and progressive, you know, so people might not necessarily know right now, today, as a result of living in a world that's primarily sedentary, how to get up on top of a wooden beam or a ledge. Well, movenet coaches, and I think that you can get. You can become a certified trainer at this point. They've got a trainer certification program, and they've got workshops all over the country, but they'll teach you. Okay, well, here's what you can do. If you don't have the upper body strength to basically do a muscle up, here's a modification, here's a progression, and it's getting people outside, it's getting people to do things that you'd get a weird look in most situations if you did. I did a movenet seminar when I was living in Orlando, and we kind of took over a local park. And so it's a bunch of grown men and a couple grown women on the playground, and we're doing precision jumps and we're balancing and we're climbing on the monkey bars, and all these other adults are there, but they're with their kids and they're not on the playground. Their kids are on the playground. So it's funny how there's this cutoff point where it's okay to play, it's okay to do these things, it's okay to balance. And you have children, I'm sure you see this. They do all this stuff kind of naturally. It just sort of emanates from them. They'll balance on a leg, they'll squat down, they'll do a somersault, they sprint over here, sprint over there. So they have this great movement, variety and this freedom to their movements that at a certain point, after maybe being told to sit still for however many years, adults think, well, I'm just going to sit here. And that's good stuff. So that was a really cool experience. And I think what he's doing with that system, it's really great. But at the same time, I know that most people aren't willing to get out in a field and have that be their fitness program. And to come up with, okay, I'm going to flip this log and I'm going to climb the street. They should be doing that kind of stuff, but it's just not where we're at as a society and a culture. So I think you need to kind of bridge that gap a little bit. And, you know, it's funny because Paleo really sort of rode the wave of CrossFit's popularity. And so CrossFit and Paleo are conflated a lot of the time where someone says, hey, I'm Paleo. It's often assumed that you're also doing CrossFit and vice versa. But I actually don't really think. I think when you look at CrossFit as a system, it really isn't very paleo outside of the fact that, yeah, there's multi joint exercises and compound movements, but it really doesn't seem like the kind of thing that our ancestors would have done. I think if you start to look at maybe some gymnastics practices, those are a little bit more. If you just even look at traditional gymnastics training, I would say that that's probably a little bit more paleo. It kind of has more of that play component. It has a little bit more of you're using your own body to kind of manipulate your way through an environment or through space. So I actually don't think that CrossFit is the best sort of quote unquote, paleo exercise.

Yeah, CrossFit is not. It wouldn't give you any evolutionary advantage per se when it comes to just like purely burning calories. You would want to conserve calories. But I do think in a certain way, even when you look at something like CrossFit, I think it would depend on your role in society, right? Like if you're a warrior or a hunter, like you would want to have your body prepared to fight and to carry heavy objects and to potentially go to battle for 20 minutes at a time or whatever. Like I could see some kind of like a CrossFit esque workout being somewhat ancestrally appropriate, depending on what your role in society played or was. But I also would point out the fact that I think most of those folks also died earlier, you know, in battle and possibly even of metabolic issues related to excessive stress. So I think it's difficult because, you know, you have a nice body and you can go to battle and win or whatever, but there might be a, might be a trade off.

I mean, I will say this about CrossFit. It very much simulates going into battle, you know, the. And I've been a part of a CrossFit, you know, I've been in and out of CrossFit gyms personally as a member at, as a Coach. I coached CrossFit, you know, up until just a few months ago at a local box here in town. And I think what's funny to me is if you actually go back to the, you know, the, the CrossFit manual. So when you get your level one certificate and you read the manual, it actually is a really great system, you know. And I think that what Greg Glassman initially laid out was gymnastics was endurance. Going for a run, learn how to do a backflip balance on Your hands, you know, so. And also lift weights, you know, so it had this. This great, you know, just kind of balance to it. But then what we've started to see is the sport of CrossFit. And that sport is just like any other sport where it's becoming more and more specific, and it kind of makes sense. It's sort of like MMA when, you know, the UFC first came out. And as these guys, you know, come in, you know, it's a guy whose qualification was that he beat up a bunch of people at a bar, and now he's in a UFC match. You know, you don't see those guys anymore. It's trained athletes who have a very specific skill set. You know, same thing with CrossFit. It's not just kind of regular guy coming in off the street. Now we have the system that they're going through, and it's very dominated by Olympic lifts. And, you know, I don't think that that's necessarily what CrossFit was when it first came out. I think CrossFit, when it first came out, actually was a little bit more like how movenet is. So I think the system has kind of evolved as it's become more popular, and now it's kind of a more specific thing, and in many ways, it's kind of not exactly what it was before. So that's just my own kind of personal interpretation of it. But if we're looking at my own individual workouts, like what I do, I'm just a fan of the primal movement pattern. Squat, lunge, push, pull. Have variety. Beat yourself up every once in a while just to know that you can. But for the most part, movement quality is my focus. I treat my movement like a practice, almost like yoga. It's mindful, intentional, quality movement. And that's what I'm trying to get. And I don't think that I need to add a huge amount of stress to my life. And kind of what I was starting to talk about before is when I've done some CrossFit wads, and that music starts going, and you see that workout on the board, and the countdown timer goes boom, boom. Your heart starts beating, you're getting jacked up, you're getting ready to go. I mean, that's probably one of the closest things that we as modern humans can experience. To William Wallace on the battlefield waving a sword and, you know, charging against the British, you know, so, you know, I think it definitely has its place, but do you need to be doing that five days a week? You know, I think if you go to CrossFit on Monday, you know, move Nat on Tuesday, go for a run on Wednesday, I mean, that's really kind of the, what I would say is the ideal. Do gymnastics class, take a boxing class, like you were saying. Yeah, I worked out at a boxing gym for three years. It was great. I worked or worked out at a climbing gym for a couple years prior to that. It was awesome. So I think having a variety of movements, just like we want a variety of positions in our body throughout the day, that's really where it's at. That's the good stuff.

Yeah. Well, Tony, there's so many other places we could go. I wanted to ask you a little bit about eating bananas and coconut milk and how we can align ourselves ancestrally with things like that and, and the 100 mile diet and everything else. And I know that you addressed some of these issues as well as some really cool recipes in your book, which is entitled, and I want to make sure I get this right, it's the entire title is Paleo A Modern Caveman's Guide to Cooking with Fire?

Yes.

And I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tony along with everything else that we talked about. I wish we had more time to delve into the rest of this stuff, but as is the case with Living in a Modern World, I have an appointment about 60 seconds from now, one of those live interviews where they want to interview you live. And if you show up late, you look bad. And I probably still need to, hey.

Ben, we don't want you to look bad, man.

I still need to go do my hair. So anyways, though, folks, if you want to learn more about Tony and you want to check out the show notes and you want to even look at his book, the Caveman's Guide to Cooking with fire, go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Tony that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com T O N Y. You can look at that. And I would also recommend, if you want to meet Tony face to face, that you attend one of my favorite conferences of the year, and that's the Paleo FX conference, which takes place in Austin, Texas. You'll always see Tony there. And Tony, thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing this stuff with us, man.

It's been my pleasure. And yeah, I'll have to do it again sometime maybe. Come on Paleo Magazine radio and we'll continue the conversation.

All right, done. Maybe we can do part two over there.

Sounds good, man. All right, Ben, have a great day.

All right. Talk to you later. Tony.

You'Ve been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com or even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice. It.