The Lifestyle of a Surfing Legend

*This is a crosspost from HackingEvolution.com*

"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

Drawbacks to Paleo Diet Branding

Having spent years in marketing and advertising, I've come to identify a drawback in the way that people perceive, and are introduced to, the Paleo Diet and its derivatives. It's something that unfortunately detracts from its worth, because it distracts from its grounding in the truth and science of human evolution.

It starts with the way the human mind is structured. Humans do really well with identity; that is, we can easily and efficiently attach an identity to an idea, regardless of whether that idea is animate. I'm talking about brands, which permeate the business world but also leak outside of it. Brands are useful precisely because they take advantage of the natural way that humans perceive identity. For commercial purposes, 'Diets' are introduced as brands because this method is the most easily digested by the market, and therefore the most economically viable. Think about The Atkins Diet, The Cabbage Soup Diet, The Juice Diet, The Hollywood Diet, The South Beach Diet -- and holy shit -- The Paleo Diet.

This is part of the reason that the Paleo Diet is belittled and trumped by the caveman mystique. It's much easier for people to latch onto 'eat like your caveman ancestors with the Paleo diet' than 'discover the appropriate species-specific diet for the human animal'. Likewise, if you wrote a book titled An Analysis of Appropriate Human Foods Informed by Evolution, it would be a publisher's nightmare because there is no brand, no meme, no idea to make the book's information easily consumable or identifiable. This has positioned the Paleo Diet between a rock and a hard place, because the brand identity itself is ultimately what limits the power of its message.

An Etymological Defense of 'Paleo'

'Paleo' has become a word. That much everyone can agree on.

It all went awry when it became a brand-philosophy. Suddenly, you had 'Ancestral'(?) thought leaders drawing arbitrary lines in the sands of progress. The movement that I had come to recognize as a loosely cohesive, diverse, and burgeoning discipline that was going to shed light on the true nature of our species and do the hard work of interpreting possible or even optimal manifestations of that truth, suddenly became a colleague-bashing, factional display of ego. There were all these people who wanted to interpret evolution in healthy debate about health -- yes, this is important -- but not wanting to participate in a cult brand or pseudo-philosophy.

So some of them disparage the word, avoid the word altogether, or even smite the logic of the word, all without offering a linguistic alternative. I'm not really here to judge the way that unfolded. I'm here to defend the simple use of the term 'paleo'. Not the brand, just the useful manipulation of an element of language.

Whether paleo-ancestral-primal-archevore-evolutionary-etc., the word 'paleo' has become a part of my vocabulary, and it will stay that way for one reason: it's useful.

When I look at my girlfriend and ask, "Is this paleo?" She knows exactly what I mean. I don't need to go into the intricacies of ratios and toxins and cooking methods and packaging. She knows exactly what I mean, and it has little to do with Cordain's Paleo Diet.

When I ask, "Is this paleo?" what I mean is, "Is this food natural to the human diet in evolutionary terms and healthful according to the general standards of ancestral health experts?"

There really is no other word that can accomplish that. It is a word rife with meaning and subtlety and complexity -- dare I say beauty -- and cannot be replaced. It has become the cutting edge of health language. The words before it, words like "organic" and "whole" and "natural" have been rendered obsolete in my eyes, because they have been captured in a word's simple evolutionary perspective. Phrases like 'all-natural feedlot beef' and 'organic whole wheat pasta' are an ancient useless language.

'Paleo' is a word that emerged from the ashes of ideological fragmentation, stronger and more comprehensive than before, and should be regarded as such.

Overcoming Nature Part II: Attraction and Marriage

Let's think primitively about the initial stages of love (and some of the mechanisms of attraction):

Step 1: Woman makes herself attractive (tight clothes, short skirts, make up, cleavage).

Step 2: Man is attracted, chases woman, makes himself attractive (dates, confidence, humor, pheromones(?)).

If attraction is developed by both parties in the initial stages of a relationship, much deeper and significant things happen. They discover common interests and passions. They develop trust and companionship. They find intimacy and love. You know, it gets all Disney and shit. (Well, not for long, some will argue.)

My beef with modern culture -- and one of the ways in which modern culture does not differ from the natural model -- is that we still play this simple game. I'm not saying that this 'game' is necessarily bad -- I'm just saying that this game can be played better.

Some degree of minimal attraction is necessary in order to tumble down the rabbit hole of love, but not much. We can be more strategic about the things we value in others from those initial points of attraction. Shouldn't men be chasing women with traits that are 'good' but outside the realm of biological attraction? Shouldn't women? Maybe it already is.

Also, the model itself can be -- and is -- manipulated at its most basic (e.g. man makes himself attractive, woman chases man). At some point, there must be attraction and an agent, someone who makes moves.

'Playing' this game all depends on individual goals. Men wanting sex will play a different strategy than men wanting marriage, for instance. And women wanting sex will...get it no matter the strategy it seems.

What has been called the 'cult of monogamy' is certainly at odds with human nature. We seem to be good at attracting and reproducing, bad at sticking it out 'til death (marriage). To some degree, there is a sense of duty and obligation to lover, family, community, and/or society that may transcend the natural compulsions of others or even some in the 'cult of monogamy' beyond religious indoctrination; that is, 'I owe it to society to stick this boring marriage out and raise this family in a stable household'. So then, why not? Why not choose the path to societal stability?

Boredom, for one. If the meaning of life is a healthy society, I might yawn while sort of agreeing. But can't that just be one goal among many? Is it even possible to balance the natural compulsions of the human animal with the communal obligation of the human being? Maybe we have already.

The modern 'cult of serial monogamy plus paramour' seems to match the ancient 'evolutionary model' to a surprising degree. Can it be that, for many, our natural compulsions are simply too strong to withstand? Has society evolved its norms and conventions in the direction of nature, all thanks to feminism?

I'll let you answer that.