Keto Paleo and Primal Play Interview

Darryl Edwards is the founder of Primal Play and the brilliant mind behind the Animal Moves workout program I’ve been sharing about lately. He joins me on The Keto Paleo Life Interview Series to discuss the importance of movement and its impact on our health.

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In today’s podcast interview we will discuss these following topics

• How becoming more physically active can be a medicine.
• Advice for maintaining the synergy between movement and nutrition.
• Going back to the basics, our ancestry, and evolutionary biology.
• Learn how movement can be an intervention for improving health.
• The story of how he started Primal Play.
• And much much more!

Hope you enjoy and learn a lot. I know I did!

Feel free to follow along using the transcript below and don’t forget to submit your questions to Vivica@…… or join The Nourished Caveman Facebook Group for ongoing interactive discussions.

 

 

*Transcript of Video Interview

Vivica: Hello everybody and welcome to the Keto Paleo Life. I am launching this new interview series with a very special guest today, Darryl Edwards who’s joining me from England. And I am really excited to have Darryl here and ask him a bunch of questions because as part of this new interview series, I really want to start digging into the lifestyle of what I call keto paleo which is much more than just your diet, much more than just your macros, but it is your whole life and your mindset as well.

 

So we’re going to have a more holistic perspective, holistic view at all the different elements that it takes for you to really achieve it’s healthy and successful lifestyle for your happiness, for your life, for your quality of life; all the good stuff that you want. So welcome Darryl and thank you for joining me today.

 

Darryl: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to speak to you from across [inaudible] [01:20] for sure.

 

Vivica: Right, right, yeah, it’s almost evening over there, right and morning over here [laughs].

 

Darryl: Yes, yes.

 

Vivica: So Darryl, I would like to start our interview today like just talking a little bit about your story because I think that it’s such a beautiful example of what we want to talk about. And how did you get to where you are right now as far as movement and your realizations about the importance of movement? Share please with us how you got here.

 

Darryl: Yes why I used to work– my former career was working with an investment banking as a technologist and so that job meant I was working pretty much seven days a week, 16 to 18 hours a day sitting in front of a series of computer screens or I did home sitting in front of a series of computer screens working. And my responsibility was one way by systems of working 24/7. So you have to be on hand, you have to be available to help out if there are issues and given that the bank was making a lot of money based on the system that I was working on highly critical systems making sure that I’ve been running and performing well.

 

And when I had an annual health check, I was told I was suffering from pre-diabetes, I was anemic, I had really poorly profile, a [unintelligible] [02:50] risk of cardiovascular disease, I was suffering from chronic lower back pain. I all– quite a few issues that became apparent during this annual health check. You know hypertension and the solution offered to me by my doctor was to take medication is I will give you some beta blockers for your blood pressure, take some [unintelligible] [03:10] for your cholesterol issues, take some pain relief for your back pain; ongoing back pain, take some [unintelligible] [03:17] for anemia.

 

And I was like okay this sounds great, this sounds like a solution. But what about side effects? How long am I going to be on these meds for? Side effects were plenty and the– in terms of the time taken on these med will be to the end of your days. So I was like okay well that sounds quite alarming. Is there anything else that I can do? And I wasn’t really given many options by my doctor so I had to– I do remember deciding okay you know what?

 

One thing I had to do, I was aware that blood pressure and being physically inactive were linked. I didn’t believe just about my genetics which is what my doctor said. “Oh is not much you can do about it, it’s just genetic.” I decided to join a gym and become more physically active. I mean being very short space of time, my blood pressure started to normalize and other health markers improved. So just becoming more physically active became a medicine for me and sort of that became a gateway for me to think about what else do I need to do because surely, there are other things that I could be doing to support a healthy lifestyle.

 

So then I looked at my diet and I started initially I did calories restriction at first because I was like I need to kind of getting to change my body composition to get the shape. So I was like maybe the best way of doing that is to lean out by reducing my calories and I just became very [unintelligible] [04:46] and didn’t look too healthy.

 

So then I went on a diet called the Zone Diet which was back then it’s about sort of 15 years ago now. What is one of the low carb diets that were mentioned. There’s the South Beach diet, there’s Ozone diet, I do a few of those. I did Ozone for a while but I was weighing and measuring my food and I felt as if I was very neurotic about it. Like I could only have nine [unintelligible] then ten. You know like to be counting in terms of blocks. So it was like in my opinion like a precursor to making sure you’re working by percentages and macros.

 

And then I had a book on my bookshelf which I call a shelf help book called The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain. So it was a shelf helpful because it was on my shelf and I bought it, put it on the shelf and didn’t look at it for a couple of years. But when I did actually get to look at it, I was like oh my goodness, there’s something here in this book which resonates with me. So I’m moving more and becoming physically active. I’m getting stronger, I’m getting healthier, let me fuel myself to ensure that I can maintain that synergy between movements and improving my nutrition.

 

And everything about that book was about going back to basics; thinking about my ancestry, thinking about evolutionary biology. You know is the first time I saw [unintelligible] [06:13] about stuff to thinking about this approach and that’s it take me fast forward 15 years on. I quit my job in banking, I cross trained a nutrition therapist, I cross trained as a personal trainer. I realize that I was most passionate about movements.

 

I wrote a book called Paleo Fitness in 2013 fit five years ago now I did a blog at that time called the Fitness Explorer. Was just me talking about movements and paleo and then I decided that I wanted to reach the masses when it came to encouraging people to move more and I came up with something called “Primal Play” which is the primary focus there was getting people to experience the joy of movements that they had as children so well and it was fun and engaging and invigorating that’s what I wanted to bring to an adults audience. That’s for kids as well. Kids from 4 to 94 is how I like to kind of sell the proposition; so proposition.

 

So that’s really my back story in a few minutes. Very very sick, find out that life style could be an intervention, movement was my gateway that then made me consider nutrition, then started looking at my sleep; how to improve my sleep quality, how I can mitigate stress because I was in a very stressful job. So all these areas combined multi-factorial ways to improve my health and I maintained a really good health profile since then. I haven’t had to go on any medication at all. I haven’t had to– I’ve been able to rely on movements and good food so pretty much supports the foundation of better health.

 

Vivica: Fantastic, yes that’s [inaudible] [07:58] story especially for those of us who are in this world of nutrition and in this world of health because I think that we, Darryl and I were having a conversation about this at some point. We met on the low carb cruise and we were able to discuss a lot of topics but the importance of movement, how it’s not really stressed in addressing lifestyle issues, addressing health issues. So even myself as a nutritionist and the work with my practice and my patients, I focus on detoxing, I focus on changing their dietary habits, I focus on giving them supplements.

 

But how much is the focus on the movement part? I would say that until now in my own practice, it was only about five percent maybe fifteen percent, ten percent. I always stressed it but not enough and in my experience Darryl, it’s like I started to do Darryl’s program last week; the beginning of this week and just by doing the program and like really consistently moving every single day. I am starting to deeply understand the benefits and how just that can add the really important part to your picture of health.

 

Darryl: Yeah.

 

Vivica: So and we’ll talk a little bit more about your program at the end of the interview, but there are a couple of questions that I really want to ask you that I think my listeners will be very interested in. We talk– I talk a lot of about adrenal health, adrenal fatigue with them and a lot of the women that come to me for help, they have major adrenal issues.

 

So as a nutritionist, I’m sure you’re familiar with the scenario of like your adrenals being constantly under stressors and then my getting fatigued, not being able– you know, either cortisol is too high or cortisol is too low. So I would like to hear your opinion on exercise as a stressor or as a stress relief. So what kind of exercise can be just a stressor, what kind of existence can be a stress relief? What’s your take on this? How do we support the adrenals through exercise?

 

Darryl: Yes, so I would say, there’s something that I would say. I would say acutely, exercise is a stressor and it should be a stressor. It should give the body physical stress overload so the body to become stronger and what research tells us is that a series of acute stresses that come from exercise would reduce chronic stress, would improve adrenal modulation, would improve the [unintelligible] [11:03] in terms of the ability to regulate cortisone and adrenaline correctly, right.

 

So the immune system improves the ability for us to regulate stress improves and so if you just– because you’re chronically stressed if you decide you know what, the best thing to do is for me to remove as many stresses as possible, that’s the best way to get back to the norm. I would argue that’s not the best way to achieve that homeostasis in managing stress. I would say you need to just dial things down and have the appropriate amount of stress that will actually lead to better able to modulate stress.

 

So somebody with adrenal fatigue, somebody who is constantly quiet or completely flat and not able to– has no energy or is constantly on the go. There are other things that I need to be considering. So for example, of course food is a great intervention but basically thinking about– you know I don’t have coffee in the morning, right. How they … are they studying cortisol– you know … in the morning because I feel that understanding how it works is going to be more beneficial to them than actually going to sleep.

 

So from a research points of view, I don’t believe there’s any single factor that needs to be added to primal healthy lifestyle. You want to take all those factors into account. You’ve got to look at your quantity of the sleep, you have to look at your quality of movement and how much movement you’re doing. You have to think about the quality of your diets and the nutrient density of your diet.

 

You have to make sure that you have periods of very very low stress so maybe meditation might be an intervention for yourself, maybe very slow low intensity movement like yoga and [unintelligible] [13:03]. But also by operating at very high intensity, right. That’s one of the ways. If you avoid stress, the body doesn’t know how to build resilience, right. So stress is a bounce. It’s also a bad resilience. It’s being able to deal with life’s challenges whether they’re the real challenges that we have to face as hunter gatherers.

 

You know being chased by [unintelligible] tiger or whether it’s the modern day perceived stress of worrying about so makes many problems of you know, my boss is going to say to me tomorrow because I haven’t completed my reports. So yes, so I try to always go back to everything space which suggests that exercise whatever persuasion which you see is chronic stress. Okay, it’s better able to regulate cortisol, better able to regulate the stress hormones.

 

Vivica: So do you think that this is like kind of like bringing us back to a stress profile that is more– is closer to the evolutionary stress profile which would be that instead of like a constant chronic stress like low burning chronic stressors, we like try to eliminate like low stressors and reduce them as much as possible but then we introduce this like high burst of stress. Like you would be running away from the tiger but instead this time, we do like primal play or you know [crosstalk] [14:27]

 

Darryl: Yes, I think that’s–

 

Vivica: — form of exercise.

 

Darryl: Yes, I totally agree. So I think sometimes, we confuse the acute of chronic and we assume if something’s chronic then avoid even the acute because surely if we want to stress out then any stress at all is bad for us, right?

 

Vivica: Yeah.

 

Darryl: Actually, no. I would argue that some stress– and again, there’s a fine balancing act here. You don’t want too much stress–

 

Vivica: Yeah.

 

Darryl: — when you’re already overly stressed. But you want some because you want your body to start recognizing what real stresses are, you want your body to say what in this situation, I need to be able to get stronger and that stress isn’t just about muscle tissue. It’s about resilience, it’s about homeostasis, it’s about your body recognizing what’s real, what’s perceived and how to better handle the fight or flight mode or the freeze mode.

 

So when do I need to do nothing at all? So the times I doing nothing is really beneficial. So if you’re chronically stressed, you need to spend that time doing nothing. If you’re frightened by a rattle snake, right you may not need to run, you may not need to fight it, you just need to stand still. So even when we’re talking about stress, we’re not holistic enough because you talk about fight or flight but we don’t mention the freeze response which is also an evolutionary adaptation where that freezing is also really good for us at times, right.

 

So I would say by engaging in very acute [unintelligible] [16:03] activity for very, very, very, very, very short bursts, spending a lot of time in this freeze mode because at the moment, [inaudible] to spend some time getting some systematic down time detoxing not just anti-inflammatory diet from a detoxing, but actually, detoxing in so many areas.

 

Vivica: Yes.

 

Darryl: Toxic relationships, social media detox, pollution. You know where there’s noise pollution, outdoor pollution. I mean there are so many areas that we need to consider. So movement is just one part of that and movements unfortunately is underrated and I have heard so many times people saying “oh what can I do, I’ve got chronic fatigue, I’m adrenally fatigued, I can’t do any exercise, I used to run marathons, I used to be really really fit now, I can’t even get out of bed and you’re telling me I need to exercise?”

 

Yes, I am actually. I am telling you to exercise but it doesn’t have to be running marathons, it doesn’t have to be doing studies say chronic cardio. It’s about changing the prescription to suit what you’re trying to deal with.

 

Vivica: It’s funny because they thought that I was going to really disagree with you during this interview but I think we’re actually on the same page.

 

Darryl: Well it’s good to hear and I’m sure some of what I’m saying will challenge some of the audience who assume if I am chronically stressed, the best thing for me to do is probably just lie in bed in a darkened room listening to [unintelligible] [17:37] and some chill out music, saying some mantras from the other side of the world.

 

Maybe that’s what people believe but we weren’t designed just to be cocooned in this really safe place, in this darkened room that we can avoid all stress because that life is better that way that’s not the reality. The reality is that we are facing or will face some stressor because we are all going to face issues that we don’t have control over. How can we better manage those? And so you go for everything into the mix to ensure you’re in a better place.

 

Vivica: Thank you yes. So let’s go in to some specifics here because this is really interesting. And like how would you apply? Let’s say one case scenario because like people really like some practical tips and some real like applyable case scenarios that they can apply to their lives. So let’s say that you are a woman and– most of my audience are women I mean. You’re not a woman [laughs] [18:40] but you have a lot of women clients I know.

 

Darryl: Yes.

 

Vivica: So if you’re a woman and who does a have extreme adrenal fatigue and you have reached the point where like you really exhausted all the time and lots of stressors all the time. So how would you restart and reset from that point? Like on a practical day to day routine. So how many days a week would you exercise, for how long and what kind of exercise would you do especially?

 

Darryl: So I would say initially, you got to consult a practitioner who can give you lots of advice, so there’s no one size fits all. It’s a bit like a nutritional intervention. If you’re healthy, then you can argue a generic clean notion diet is the way to go. If you’re dealing with a particular issue, then you may need to have some elimination, you may need to have something that’s going to improve that flaw. You know there are particular interventions that will target particular issues. I would say it’s exactly the same thing for movement and exercise as medicine. It depends on the individual. I could not give you a generic prescription.

 

What I would say though because as you say people want–they like tips, they like some instructions is that for an individual who’s completely– feels completely tired, fatigued, have no energy to get out bed, I would say to satisfy the intellect, I would say that mitochondria which provides energy to the cell; power house of the cell, right. The best way, the only proven way to improve the volume and to create mitochondria and some mitochondria genesis is through movement, is through physical activity.

 

So even a very short burst. If you get out of bed and the first thing you want to do is to drink some cup of coffee, instead of making that cup of coffee, spend a few seconds; do some jumping jacks, sprinting on the spot, getting yourself out of breath within seconds. Doesn’t have to be a long period of time. Just enough for you to get the blood rushing, just enough for you to get out of breath, just enough for you to realize that you’re alive, right that’s what I’m talking about. So it doesn’t have to be much.

 

And just by doing that just a few seconds in the morning instead of preparing that coffee which you know will elevate your cortisol, right we’ll give us [unintelligible] [21:03] and spike artificially so by drinking caffeine. Instead of doing that, do some movements for 10, 20 seconds, see how you feel. You will feel as if that’s going to be my first day in hell. You may feel that way after 20 seconds of doing so but you’ll start building some resilience, you’ll see how you feel the next day. You know what? Maybe I’m not quite right today, I’ll take a day off. So maybe every other day to begin with at 20 seconds.

 

And I was looking at some research the other day I spent a lot of time looking at cancer, researching cancer especially physical activities and intervention. And one of the things that is advised to chemotherapy patients so those of you can argue I’m also– I mean pretty much all of their systems are broken after chemo. Everything is flat, they’re fatigued, they have no energy.

 

Exercise, pretty intensive exercise is used as a way to reduce fatigue. You could ask a question, “why should somebody be given this intervention?” Why is research tell us that exercise is one of the best ways of reducing fatigue and then say you know what, you’re fatigued, don’t do any exercise because your adrenals are a bit screwed up. So yeah, so that’s what I would suggest. Start gently but intensely.

 

Vivica: Yeah.

 

Darryl: See how you feel and then try to slowly increasing your dose and make sure you’re having enough rest and recovery, make sure you’re having some significant down times so that you don’t get into like an over training state.

 

Vivica: Great, so yeah. I just want to say that I have a rebounder and sometimes, like I wake up in the morning just feeling absolutely blah and what I do is I do about 30 seconds of jumping jacks on my rebounder; is one of those little trampoline. And even like in between my days like because I sit a lot on this computer and so when I feel like oh I have been sitting for three hours, so I just run outside and bounce for like a minute like a crazy person.

 

But just getting like– because I don’t have time to do anything else and I mean I could just do jumping jacks behind my chair honestly but the rebounder is like I like it because it’s easy on the knees and it’s more fun you know [crosstalk] [23:30]. It’s right behind my chair in my office. When like it’s winter and it’s cold, I put the rebounder right behind my chair. I get up from the chair, bounce for five minutes, for one minute, for thirty seconds and then I go back to sitting. So I really like that idea of like that little short burst. And so we call that high intensity interval training kind of, right that’s kind of like a fancy name for that or —

 

Darryl: Yeah, so if it’s something that you can do it for about 20 seconds and feel like I couldn’t do a second longer, that would be high intensity. There’s no intervals there because you’re [crosstalk] [24:09]. Yeah, so you know but I mean you got one better, put on– You know what? Have your favorite music a mouse click away and use that as your way to get yourself moving for a minute or so.

 

I mean dance like you were a teenager. Put your favorite song on that you used to play in repeat and use that as you make yourself to have some fun because even something like doing jumping jacks and for me, if I have to do a minute of jumping jacks, I mean that minute will last for like an hour to me, right. Doesn’t you know for yourself it works, right, but it doesn’t work for everyone. So for me, that doesn’t work.

 

So sometimes especially when no one is around, I’ll put on like my favorite Michael Jackson track that I used to listen to in the early ‘80s, I’ll pretend I’m the best dancer in the world, I’ll moonwalk; doesn’t matter what it looks like but I’ll give it a try and I have a smile on my face and I have lots of fun. So I think if you can infuse fun into movement which is what I try to do with primal play, that’s a great way to give you some motivation to do it.

 

Vivica: That sounds awesome and yeah, I want to talk about the program in a second, but I have another question that it’s really pressing for me and I’d love to hear your take on that one. And by the way, you guys I saw Darryl in action on the cruise on the dance floor and yes, he came [laughs] burst a mean move. He’s not joking.

 

Darryl: Maybe I’ve retired a long time ago but every now and again, I come out every time [laughs].

 

Vivica: He was the life of the dance floor. So about metabolic rate. Is it something that it’s very present in my day to day practice I get asked a lot of questions and I have to deal with these with my patients. So when you get that case scenario where somebody comes with this extremely low metabolic rate and because of yoyo dieting all their lives and they have tried all the different diets; mostly low fat high carb, were super calorie restrictors. So it’s just like the metabolic rate keeps getting lower and lower and the same time on the other side in the endocrine scenario, they had like super tired adrenals and kind of general hormone disregulation [sic].

 

Darryl: Yes.

 

Vivica: So how do you balance that, how do we resuscitate the metabolic rate, how do we get them to burn some calories for energy again instead of being like frozen like in a block of ice?

 

Darryl: I mean even if somebody with– You know again and this is probably where we might slightly disagree, you know metabolic rate. Even if you have a low metabolic rate or lower than what it should be, majority of your calorie burn, your calorie expenditure is maintained that you expend every day is literally maintaining your being alive, right. So you’re doing nothing, absolutely nothing all day. You’re going to be burning too fast plus the amount of calories you need just based on you just breathing and being alive, right.

 

So even somebody who has a low metabolic rate, you’re probably going to be down regulated by a few hundred calories at most to go. It’s not that significant. What makes the biggest difference to your metabolic rate is the amount of fat mass that you have on board. So fats tissue, adipose tissue is less metabolic reactive than muscle tissue. So if you increase lean body mass, if you increase lean muscle mass, you will burn more calories. So for example, I think a pound of muscle will burn 9, 10 calories per day. A pound of fat mass might burn about 5 or 6, okay.

 

So there’s a difference, quite significant difference in the burn rate if you’re just doing more muscle than fat. So I can increase my metabolism just by increasing amount of lean muscle mass that I have and that I’d say is the best way of doing so. It’s a very simply equation. Do more exercise, build more lean muscle mass, you will reduce the amount of body fat you’re having to maintain and then your metabolism will increase. There’s interesting studies actually that those who are overweight or obese can actually have a faster metabolism than somebody who is lean. Do you know why that is? Not many people are aware of that.

 

Vivica: No.

 

Darryl: The reason being is because they tend to have taken to account they increase the amount of body fat, they have more muscle mass in comparison to somebody who is a lot lighter than they are. So their total muscle mass is more even though the percentages is less, their total muscle mass is more and muscle mass is I’d say metabolically very demanding.

 

So they can have a faster metabolism. So in other words, somebody who is obese might need two and a half thousand, three thousand calories just to maintain themselves at rest. I may need only two thousand even though I have much less body fat than they do. Do you see what I’m saying?

 

Vivica: Yes.

 

Darryl: So some of this is kind of– it’s a bit of a mess. It’s [unintelligible] [29:40] most about metabolic management of the metabolism and even though many of us can go into starvation mode, we can dial that down by say yoyo dieting and series of crash diets that can occur, but it’s very easy to get out of that just by exercising and building the muscle mass.

 

So changing your diet alone, even if you’re losing body fat, right, even if you’re losing weight may not add and increase percentage in body mass. You may be actually losing muscle tissue whilst you diet. You may be losing bone density as you diet. So we need to be aware that it’s important to track not just body weight, not just your metabolism, but your percentage of body fat and your percentage of lean muscle mass.

 

Vivica: And yeah, that totally makes sense to me and for me, it really comes into this bigger picture of like restoring your health before you even try to lose weight because I get a lot of patients that come to me wanting to lose weight and they just don’t want to do the work or like they just want a quick solution, a quick fix. Like they don’t want to wait. But this is not just about like you say restoring this metabolic rate but for me, it’s like getting healthy.

 

Like you get into healthy weight when you get healthy and not by trying to force your body to like shed weight because you’re so fixed on that number on the scale that means something when in reality, like what is underneath the surface is exactly what you’re talking about. You know that’s why they talk about skinny fat because some people like they’re not overweight but they also they’re very low in muscle mass and so that leads to like a number of other health implications.

 

Darryl: Yes, for sure. I used to be a skinny fat myself. So I looked okay on the outside but I wasn’t okay on the inside. And so yeah, so just focusing on the weight, total body weight isn’t always a good idea and we know that the more– The way I’d like to put it is it’s kind of excess. There’s a frame that you have and there’s a point where an excess in body weight will be too demanding for what you need to be carrying in terms of body weight around with you and it will have an impact on your metabolic health i.e. you will have increased risk of metabolic syndrome, increase risk of cardiovascular disease.

 

It will lead to being unhealthy and the same goes the other way. If you go past the point of kind of weight homeostasis whereby you have lost too much weight, then we know there are also implications and those implications can mean for women missing their periods, you know amenorrhea for example. There are so many issues that can occur; brittle bones, being auforensic, kind of being erotic about what you eat and don’t eat and how you look in the mirror and aesthetics; focus on aesthetics rather than health. So I think there is a sweet spot and that sweet spot isn’t saying I am X number of pounds or kilos.

 

The sweet spot is what maintains really good health for you. You need to be aware that health is not just one or two markers that our [unintelligible] [33:09] lab can provide for us. Our body is extremely complicated. There are so many factors that lead to good health now and also good health and longevity for the future. So I try to minus as many indicators as I can. Some very very simple and some that may be more complicated. But day to day I like to focus on the things I don’t have to worry about so much. So I focus on things like my blood pressure. So I have a tendency to have hypertension. Those with African decent which I am tend to have high blood pressure than those of you … so I track that.

 

It’s one of the biggest causes of death, of premature death so I track that on a regular basis. I track my resting heart rate because resting heart rate is linked to longevity. The less my heart has it does from one minute to the next, it proves that I’m health, a healthy individual than if my heart rate is another ten beats per minute. So there are things that I can track without going– having reading through some tests. So my– I don’t know what my weight is but I having a weight it’s like body fat percentages for example because that gives you more information.

 

Vivica: Beautiful, thank you. I think that’s really important in this part also of like the mindset approach and like the changing the mindset towards our bodies, of image, how this is like a whole other big conversation and– you know?

 

Darryl: Yes.

 

Vivica: I could be talking to you for hours on all these different topics. Thank you so much Darryl. Like you are–

 

Darryl: You’re welcome.

 

Vivica: — really like super experienced and knowledgeable person and thank you so much for sharing that knowledge with us and when the listeners here, I want to just like share about your program and I can’t show it on the computer but Animal Moves is the latest book. It’s Darryl’s latest book and this has a program but it also has an online program with amazing videos and explanations and it’s like all broken down; 30 days. And I am going to be posting a link under the video and in the blog post so you guys will know how to find it.

 

I am doing the program now. I’m in week one. I think today is day four and I’m feeling benefits already; unbelievable, and I’m doing this with my yoga teacher and my friend who is very fit and it’s not easy. It’s challenging, it’s hard, it’s super fun. You guys I am on Instagram and like the nudge came in on Instagram. I’ll be posting stories almost every day with my progress and the silly stuff we do with Darryl. I’ve seen some of that. Tell us a little more about the program Darryl. What do you want to add to that?

 

Darryl: Yes, so I basically wanted people to– to give people a way to incorporate a more balanced movement diet. So most of us tend to be like– If you love avocadoes and then decide you know what, all I’m going to eat are avocadoes from now on. And as nutritious as they are, they don’t give us everything that we need, right. Even liver as nutritious nutrient dense and as liver is, if we only had liver and that was it over time, there will be some deficiencies; nutrient deficiencies.

 

So I think it’s the same in fitness. If you only move in one way all the time, you start building up some deficiencies in terms of what our body needs from movement and physical activity. So that means not just what you do but the intensity that you work in, durations that involves the type of movement patterns that you engage in and I wanted to use the animal kingdom as a reference.

 

So humans are generally good in some movements, not very good a specialist. So we can’t run very fast like a cheetah can out run us very easily, a camel could outsprint Hussein Bolt for example. We can’t jump very far and so far stronger than we are in terms of their body weight. They can lift up to a hundred times their body weight. We can lift two or three times and we celebrate that and those are the strongest individuals on the planet who can do so. So by mimicking the animal kingdom, by moving in the way that they move, will become more human. So we take on board patterns, we start becoming more like our ancestors were. We crawl to track animals, we climb trees from better vantage point, we sprint to run away from places or sprint towards predations to be able to capture animals.

 

They would jump, they would lift and carry. So there’s so many movement patterns that we engage in. I wrote packages in a book and say train like an animal to become more human. Move this way at varying intensities because then your movement diet will become richer and more nourishing.

 

Vivica: Right.

 

Darryl: So to be a more nourished caveman or cavewoman part of that incorporates movements and movements of different persuasions. So it’s like a birthday, your birthday smorgasbord of movements but you have to take part in all of them. You have to take part in every single part of the birthday. You know what? No, I’m not going to have desserts. No, you have to have the best experience.

 

Vivica: Yeah.

 

Darryl: You have to have all of the components of movement and of fitness. So that’s pretty elaborate way of explaining what that book —

 

Vivica: And the program.

 

Darryl: — and the online program. So yeah, the book only goes far because it’s obviously better for you to first to visualize what the movement patterns should be looking like. There’s a group, private group on Facebook of those who are taking part in the challenge if you can have it going on and that works really well. So as Vivica said, there’s a– there’ll be a link somewhere down there maybe it’s– I don’t know which side it is. I was going to cover all bases. It’s there somewhere. Click the link and you find out a lot more about the online challenge; the Animal Moves challenge.

 

Vivica: Well thank you so much Darryl. This was I think super informative and really helpful and we might have to have another chat again sometime soon because I have three more questions that I was going to ask you but we’re running out of time. Yeah, I’m going to keep everybody posted on the how my progress goes. I’m really excited about doing this program and it’s like I say been super fun. So where can people find your social media? Last little thing. Where do they find you aside from below here?

 

Darryl: Below there. If you want to find out a lot more about Primal Play and the philosophy, you can go to primalplay.com. So I do provide some games and some exercise and activities but I also provide a lot of evidence as well.

 

Vivica: Best fitness website of 2018 by Paleo Magazine. You should mention that.

 

Darryl: Yes actually, well it’s better when somebody else mentions it.

 

Vivica: Okay.

 

Darryl: So I’m glad you did. So yes because it sounds like I’m just pretending if I say it. So thank you for mentioning that. But yes, so if you want some research, if you want to find out a lot more about Primal Play and about movement as medicine, primalplay.com If you search for Darryl Edwards, D-A-R-R-Y-L Edwards, Google has been wonderful to me.

 

So you will notice that I am number one on Google if you search for me of course. So it’s very easy to find out what I do or where I’m at and if you turn to social media @fitnessexplore is my moniker so you can find me on Twitter, on Instagram. You can search for me on Facebook. So I kind of spread myself probably [unintelligible] [41:13] times.

 

But yeah, I like to engage the people and I like hearing feedback. So if you have any questions, if you want to find out more about what I do and why I do it, please interact with me on social media. Because I don’t have any real friends so any virtual ones who want to contact me kind of makes my day.

 

Vivica: Darryl is actually really available and he is awesome in answering questions because I’ve been pestering him with questions about the courses since I started. So thank you so much Darryl. It was an awesome interview and good luck with your course and on your future endeavors.

 

Darryl: Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure. You’ve been a fantastic host and I look forward to part two in the near or distant future.

 

Vivica: All right and thank you so much you guys for watching the Keto Paleo Life.