Austin is for Paleos
on February 12, 2012
The speakers to have graced the Austin Primal Living Group with their presence and knowledge keep getting better and better! Indeed, I just got back from today’s meetup, which saw Dr. Amy Myers speak to us about the role of diet in autoimmune disease at our favorite venue, Efficient Exercise. We didn’t record the talk this time, but here’s the summary: it’s all inflammation.
What made the talk special wasn’t so much the concepts (preaching to the choir), but rather the real life examples she could pull out for just about every case. It makes you realize how effective a basic anti-inflammation diet can be, reversing disease left and right, even for people that conventional medicine gave up on.
I was also very impressed with the level of questions that the audience brought with them—almost every single question invited a very insightful response. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a satisfactory response to one of my own questions, which considered the possibility of false positives in elimination diets (inception courtesy of Will Hui). For example, I’ve eliminated a few foods that paleos hold sacred because I appeared to have a reaction upon re-introduction, yet I can’t be sure if it’s the act of elimination itself that subsequently made me intolerant, or whether I had been intolerant all along. At this rate, with the types of food getting eliminated, there’s not much left for me to eat if I want to stay inflammation-free, so something is fishy (literally?).
Putting aside my enthusiasm for today’s meetup for a moment, I want to reflect on how far the Austin Primal Living Group has come recently, especially in the light of all the PaleoFX buzz; in fact, we’re getting dozens of out-of-towners joining the group in preparation for PFX, reaching out to our community. I often think about what a crazy accident it was that I decided to search Meetup.com for “paleo” on June 24th, 2010, and that a then-stranger named Bryan had just created the group a single day earlier on June 23rd. I ended up being the third member ever, right behind him and his now-wife Tracy (who at the time only joined because she “had to” :)
Since I took over the group in July, it’s given me access to a much larger paleo audience than this blog will ever see, yet it was all one stroke of incredible coincidence that made it possible. What if I had searched just one day earlier and not found the group—how long would it have taken me to try the search again, thinking that paleo simply wasn’t happening in Austin?
But paleo is happening in Austin, man. And a lot of it at that. From APGL to PFX to paleo doctors like Dr. Myers and Dr. Sebring to being “the epicenter of physical culture” (a phrase often used by half-man-half all-beast Keith Norris), it’s all here surrounding a few-miles stretch of I-35.
With Valentines Day coming up, I’m reminded that I haven’t found love in Austin. But, man, I’ve sure found paleo.
