Paleo by barbara seynaeve

PREHISTORY OF THE FUTURE

Raw Culture

We leave the battlefield and end up in prehistoric times. It is an era that appeals to one’s imagination. Every young person at some time or another is obsessed with dinosaurs, hunting, making fire with flints, building huts, herbal drinks or something else that formed part of the cave dwellers’ daily lives. Now there is good news for those who look back with great nostalgia. Pre-historic times are back and they can be enjoyed by people of all ages. In a world full of high-tech novelties, we are falling back on the lifestyle of our ancestors. A few years ago, utensils such as the Neolithic Ceramic Cooking Knives and the Homo Sapiens Multi-Purpose Kitchen appeared in the kitchen. The food made with these types of kitchen utensils preferably does not just come from the supermarket. More and more Millennials are getting their hands dirty to provide for their own food. They go hunting and foraging. Street fishing is giving the age-old image of angling a boost. Wild-pickers are more animal friendly. They are urban and rural food-gatherers of seasonal crops, leaves and fruits. They comb the town and its outskirts with their smartphone in their back pocket. Online wild-picking guides and mobile apps help them in their quest. Foraging for food yourself not only has something adventurous but also puts pure, unprocessed food on your plate. The hunter-gatherer idea is an enormous hype and part of a lifestyle that many young people find appealing. Back in the days, 10,000 years ago, we ate what we could hunt or find – meat, fish, nuts, leafy greens, regional veggies, roots and seeds. And it took quite some physical exercise to provide for food. Protagonists swear high and low that this caveman diet is beneficial to your health and well-being. Critics suggest that it may be a fad diet and that it can even signify some risk to your health. Yet, the Paleo Movement is growing at an enormous speed. Europe’s

first restaurant dedicated to Stone-Age food recently opened in Berlin, and in Denmark a few young people started up a Paleo take-away restaurant in 2012. You can recognise the die-hard Paleo addicts by the shoes they wear. The most known example of barefoot shoe design is the Vibram FiveFingers, in which there are separate slots for each toe. These shoes have recently been banned by the US Army for image reasons. But don’t worry, there are still other barefoot shoe models. The Nike Free line footwear has a segmented sole, although it is still cushioned to a certain degree. Saucony came up with the Kinvara line, the key property of which is a dropped sole. By dropping the sole, its thickness is halved, which means that a great part of the heel cushioning is removed, so that one’s mid-foot is stimulated to strike the ground. Saucony extended their minimalist-shoe line by coming up with Hattori in April 2011. This was their first zero-drop shoe, which means that the height between the heel and the ball of the foot is the same. Today, most leading shoe manufacturers have minimalist running shoes available. It is an enormous success. Minimalist running shoe sales have increased and are currently an industry worth $1.7 billion. Vibram FiveFingers alone experienced a sales increase from $450,000 in 2006 to $50 million in 2011.

Recipe: archerytalkblog.com

Neolithic Ceramic Cooking Knive by Matthias Kaeding; Homo Sapiens by Marie Garnier; VibramFive Fingers, Nike Free, Saucony Kinvara, Saucony Hattori

S T ONE - AGE HOT D O G S A shared interest in fitness training and food made Peter (26), Mads (29) and Christian (26) come up with the idea to provide a healthy, quick and nutritious alternative to the traditional fast-food and take-away restaurants. They opened “Palæo” on 15th March and a second take-away followed on 12th October . Both of these are in their hometown of Copenhagen. “We combine the best from the world of primitive man with the best from modern man’s lifestyle”, they say.

name: Peter Emil Nielsen age: 26 from: Malaga, Spain currently living: Copenhagen, Denmark occupation: Student, Entrepreneur company website: www.palaeo.dk, www.frokostfirmaet.dk

We really want Palæo to fulfill its true potential, it’s really a great concept! One day it would be great to be able to look back at my life and smile, knowing I’ve changed someone’s life in a healthy way.

These young men are ambitious. “In the long term we want to expand throughout Europe. For us, Palæo is a public health project in which the consumers should perceive their change in diet as a bonus, not a compromise.” Besides, a Stone message says “There is beauty in simplicity. When all excess has been removed, it is easier to focus on the essential and the things that count.“

Raw Culture

The three boys did cross fit training, and were very focused on diet and health. If you train hard, and your muscles need to recover quickly, you need a lot of protein. Stone-Age food contains large amounts of meat, eggs and fat, so the body gets exactly what it needs after being under pressure. At “Palæo” they give centuries of dietary advice an about-turn. The purpose is to give simple, basic, Nordic raw materials a renaissance, and make honest, natural, rustic food. Everything is made from regional products and a minimum of processing. However, the food gets an urban and experimental interpretation and the emphasis is on the taste. “We call it Primal Gastronomy”, they say.

“If I have entrepreneurial blood? I bought myself into my partner’s company Frokostfirmaet 5 years ago, when I was 21. My father and my uncle are both entrepreneurs and they have been a true inspiration. So I guess you could say it’s in the blood.”

LEANDER, A PALEO AMBASSADOR

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Leander was rather chubby when he was younger. He had had enough of this at the age of 16 and decided to switch to a new way of life. He started doing hardcore fitness training and weightlifting. He was obsessively preoccupied with eating and doing sports. He studied Physical Education, not because he was an ace at sports but because it was the perfect way to keep his body in shape and get a degree at the same time. His muscle and self-confidence grew and he began to fantasize about how he could help others in their fight against the scales. He followed additional training sessions in England, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, both during and after his studies. He had his business plan ready when he qualified as personal trainer: he would offer an alternative to boring indoor fitness training. It didn’t take long before he discovered the Paleo lifestyle. Leander tried it out and made it part of his way of life. His weight was back to normal, he no longer suffered from injuries and he slept better. He adjusted his business plan and started up TROOP-OUT. We wanted to know more about this ...

name: Leander Verbraeken age: 25 currently living in: Merelbeke, Belgium occupation: Personal Trainer website: www.troop-out.be, www.leander.be

I was impressed by your web site. Can you shortly describe what is exactly that you do at TROOP-OUT? I do outdoor boot camps with innovative tools in the context of a special sport and food philosophy, which is called “Primal lifestyle”. I give personal training in addition to group lessons. I position myself in the market as “the weight-loss specialist”. I train my clients at home or in the nearby park. Most of my clients are women. They sense that I understand them because of my personal experience. Can you tell us what a normal working day is like? I get up and have breakfast if I’m hungry. In the mornings I mostly have a big breakfast because it is the most important meal of the day - - all the fruit and vegetables I can find. These are often leftover vegetables from the supper from the night before or soup. I also see to it that I have some protein in the morning. This I get from egg, fish, meat or a derivative of these. I also drink coffee. It is a natural product that has many benefits to offer your body. And it wakes you up (chuckles).

Then I train people throughout the day and I am constantly on the road. There is always 86% chocolate and a mixture of nuts lying in the car for when I get hungry. I often only have my next meal at about 4 or 5 o’clock. This is also a meal consisting mainly of vegetables. I especially have a lot of avocados, combined with some meat or poultry, but that actually varies from one day to the next. I eat different things so that there’s variation in my diet every day. Most of the time, I don’t eat anything after 6 o’clock and I fasting intermittently until the following morning. I also try to fit in a short running session of a distance of 2 to 3 km at about 8 o’clock every day. I then get slightly hungry and get into bed with a low insulin level, which makes me sleep like a log and in the meantime burns fat (chuckles again). What is ntermittent fasting exactly? Intermittent fasting can be approached in a thousand and one different ways, but they all involve going without food for a certain amount of time. It is important to know that you can only fast if you are “Ketoadapted”. This means that you no longer depend on sugar and that you can get your glucose from the fat reserves in your body. Cells are stimulated to repair instead of divide themselves when we are in a “hunger or fasting” period. This means that your body uses energy much more economically, which gives you cells that are a lot healthier instead of cheap and sloppy divided cells... Since I never eat after 6 pm anymore. And I feel incredibly good and energetic, I’m leaner, I sleep better, my resistance is super and I feel happy and content ...

To what degree do you follow the paleo lifestyle? You can take the primal lifestyle as far as you want. I think it is important that you don’t just follow the diet but also adjust your exercises. During the week I strictly eat only things from Nature. In practice, this means eating masses of fruit and vegetables, lean meat, high-quality fish or poultry, nuts, dark chocolate and perhaps some healthy unrefined carbohydrates derived from red potatoes, rice or fruit and vegetables containing starch. The general rule here is: don’t eat processed foods. I obviously don’t apply this as strictly at weekends.

In addition, I try to run barefoot as much as possible. In this way I feel the sensation of where I am and my feet develop correctly. In the summer the distances I run are always barefoot and I always wear minimal shoes, which are my Vibram Fivefingers. Do you sometimes have difficulties following the strict diet? It’s a diet. You choose to do what’s good for your body. Nobody tells me what to eat. I don’t follow a manual, don’t count any points, weigh anything or let the clock tell me when to eat. I just do it because I know that the alternative is unhealthy. Yes, I also

sometimes eat chips and pasta at the restaurant ... I think that you must be able to do this once in a while otherwise you won’t be able to hold out anyway and in this way I always stay intrinsically motivated. Doing it like this is really very easy to keep going! The “Paleo scene” is much bigger in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands than it is in Belgium. There are already Paleo restaurants in Germany and Paleo caterers and clothes shops in the United States. Will Paleo conquer Europe? It is simply inevitable that Paleo will grow. The obesity problem alone will see to

that and also because the quality of our food is deteriorating by the day. People are objecting to this. Our society is increasingly being dominated by technology and electronics. i-Pads, laptops, deadlines, targets, etc. People are falling back on something that feels reassuring: back to basics, Nature, TROOP-OUT!

Raw Culture

Of course I find physical exercise very important because that is my job. I do exercises like a caveman. That means doing outdoor sport and playing with the own body weight in a natural environment, doing exercises ranging from basic exercises such as running, jumping, crawling, hanging, swinging, balancing, swimming, fighting, climbing, etc. I train in my natural habitat without expensive apparatus, in the way my body should do exercises: 3-dimensionally. I never run long distances of more than 10 km, for example. I can’t imagine that primordial men did this. That takes too much energy. It is much more logical to do a maximum number of short sprints. I can easily imagine that a caveman would have had to do this while he was hunting or attacking an enemy.

Finally, do you see your job as a mission? Do you envisage any higher aspirations with what you do? I want to show people that there are other things besides the Western diet and that exercise and food from Nature can be an immense added value to our lives.

“There’s no rocket science in the fact that you live healthier from what Nature has to offer than from the traditional Western processed-foods diet ...”